The Imperative of Co­Creation in Interstellar Communication:
Lessons from Experimental Music

– a presentation given this past March to a distinguished group of scientists, artists, and scholars of the humanities attending a workshop held in Paris on the design, interpretation, and transmission of interstellar signals, Encoding Altruism: The Art and Science of Interstellar Message Composition, sponsored by The SETI Institute; Leonardo Observatory for the Arts and TechnoSciences; The John Templeton Foundation; The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (ISAST); and The International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) Permanent SETI Study Group. An abstract from the presentation has been publihsed as: The imperative of co–creation in interstellar communication: lessons from experimental music. (2003). Leonardo Electronic Almanac, 11, 7. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. [Online distribution.]. Rosenboom also served on the workshop programming committee. Abstracts from the workshop are available at: http://publish.seti.org/art_science/2003/

Propositional Music from Extended Musical Interface with the Human Nervous System

– a presentation given this past October in Venice, Italy to an international conference, The Neurosciences and Music: Mutual Interactions and Implications on Developmental Functions, sponsored by the Mariani Foundation and Venice International University with co­sponsorship from New York Academy of Sciences, European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music, 7th International Conference on Music Perceptiona & Cognition (Australia), and International Society for Music in Medicine. A paper with the same title, summarizing the presentation has been published in: Avanzini, G., Faienza, C., Lopez, L., Majno, M., and Minciacchi, D. (Eds.). The Neurosciences and Music, Volume 999 of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1-9. New York: NYAS. [Also published in Annals Online.

The Sal-Mar Construction Revived

– this legendary electronic music construction built by Salvatore Martirano and his engineering collaborators in the early 1970s at the University of Illinois has recently been brought back to life by engineer, Greg Danner. On April 1, 2004, as part of his residency at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and a conference, New Directions in the Study of Musical Improvisation, David Rosenboom, who worked closely with Martirano in the 1960s and early 1970s and continued to collaborate with him in various contexts occasionally over the next 25 years, gave a talk about the instrument and its significance followed by a concert performance. This was the first time the instrument had been played in many years. The event was video taped.