Reuben Son
About
Reuben Son (b. 1986) is a software developer, sound artist, and ceramist based in NYC.
Formerly an engineer at New York Magazine, he is currently on professional sabbatical, but open to short-term creative projects and collaborations.
Sound
As a sound artist, he explores the notion of composition as the deployment of strategies for dealing with the propositional materiality of sound. Drawing from the origins of computing within the history of textile production, his current body of work attempts to formalize this idea of sonic materiality by abstracting principles of weaving and textile design into a generative framework for electronic music production.
Selected Discography
Days Gone By (2012)
7" record on Wagtail RecordingsAsleep at the Drawing Board (2014)
7" record on Private ChronologyStill Sleeping (2015)
Digital-only on Private ChronologyUntitled Maquette (2015)
7"/CD on Estuary Ltd.
In Collaboration
- Worked with Eli Keszler in both instrumental and technical capacities for a number of installations and performances at sites such as The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Boston Center for the Arts, Eyebeam, and the MIT List Center.
- Developed a standalone application for James Hoff entitled Hobo UFO, in which navigation and camera movement in Google Maps Street View responds to live audio and MIDI control in real-time. Hobo UFO was premiered at the London ICA in 2016, and presented at various other venues and festivals between 2016 and 2019. Most recently, a video edition was produced for PAN.
QCVG
The QCVG (Quad Control Voltage Generator) is a hardware and software package designed and developed for computerized control of an analogue modular synthesizer.
On the hardware side, the QCVG is comprised of an Arduino Nano microcontroller interfaced to a pair of dual-DAC chips, which provide four channels of 0-4V CV (control voltage), and four trigger outputs (for triggering envelope generators in the synthesizer). Each CV output may be patched into an oscillator to control its pitch, and the trigger outputs are to be patched into envelope generators to control the articulation of notes through a voltage-controlled amplifier (VCA). The C++ library for the QCVG is still under development and a small production run of the hardware may be produced in the future.
The following demo was recorded in a single unedited take. Source code on GitHub.
Read MorePrivate Chronology
Private Chronology was a micro-label operating between 2009 and 2015, with 10 editions published in cassette, vinyl, and digital formats.
Still Sleeping is the final release on Private Chronology, and consists of electronic music made with a Eurorack modular synthesizer. Although much of the sound design was executed using traditional analogue techniques, control signals were generated digitally using simple algorithms programmed on the QCVG.
Visit the Private Chronology ArchiveCeramics
