World Record Ballon Blower-upper

Hello all.  Many have seen this on Facebook, but here is the video of me breaking the Guinness Record for most balloons inflated in 1 hour by 1 person.  The new record is 582, as you can see below.

April 9th Concert

Hello all. For those in the Kansas City area, I have two events coming up on Saturday. I am presenting a paper in the morning at UMKC on why we like bad music, and I am performing Ohia and Lehua, for saxophone and electronics as part of the Midwestern Collegiate Composers Exchange. More information is available at http://emccomposers.org/

New Mouthpiece

The private screening of the new line of mouthpieces (designed by Jacob Crandall and myself) took place today. Though this is an engineering project, it is music-related, so I thought it would be appropriate to mention. I can't speak about the specific design elements on this website, as it could jeopardize the international patent; however, I can say that the project was well received. There was even time for a live demonstration of one new model!! If this designed is published in the Case magazine, or anywhere else, I will post a link. If not, this is probably the final word.

Acoustics Research Project Completed

Today completes the 4 month project I have been working on with MechE professor Isaac Greber. I compared digital, synthesized, instruments to live instruments (flute, saxophone, marimba, and violin). Our hypothesis, which was confirmed, was that the instruments with simple waveforms were better approximated by the digital synthesizers than instruments with complex waveforms. There were some other interesting and unexpected results. The most striking being that the high frequency peaks in the complex waveforms (violin and saxophone) have been drastically reduced in the synthetic sound. We think this is done on purpose so that the synthesizer can support many instances of the same sample while avoiding "beating" in the upper registers.