Chester Jankowski: music catalogue

This was the first tape piece I completed while studying Electroacoustic with Gus Ciamaga at the (computer-)world famous UTEMS: the University of Toronto Electronic Music Studio. Founded in 1959, this was the second electronic music studio to open its doors in North America (the first was the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center). But in 1993, the studio was about ready for a refresh, which happened over the next couple of years.

I had already been using the fractal notion of self-similarity as an organizing principle. I think this piece was the first time I used chaotic orbits to generate pitch material. The studio housed some Atari ST computers, which initially seemed rather unappealing for me, but which had on them a BASIC interpreter called T-BASIC. T-BASIC had built-in commands for generating MIDI. I had first started programming in BASIC at about the age of nine so I was able to write some useful programs very quickly. I used the Logistic map to generate MIDI sequences, honing in on interesting chaotic parts, and also playing with attractors. The primary synthesizers were a Proteus and the (already antique) DX-7.