Butch Rovan: Making electronic music fits him like a glove

In today's age of technology, we can talk to friends across the globe over the Internet and check our e-mail almost anywhere in the great outdoors from a cell phone. Some say computers have robbed us of our emotions and replaced them with pixels and bits and bytes of information.

Joseph "Butch" Rovan, assistant professor of composition and computer music and director of the Center for Experimental Music and Intermedia in the College of Music, has found a way to take human emotions, demonstrated through motions and movements, and express them with music.

"From a creative standpoint, I like exploring the way a performer interacts with technology — not just how a performer plays a keyboard or makes electronic music through a computer, but how human gesture can be expressed through technology," Rovan says.

Rovan grew up in Southern California playing the clarinet and saxophone in his high school jazz band. After high school, he played in several rock bands and signed a recording contract. During the day, Rovan worked in electronic manufacturing. Later, he earned his bachelor's and master's of arts degrees in music and composition from the University of California at Riverside and his doctorate in composition from the University of California at Berkeley.

"When I went to college, I decided that I liked music, but I wanted to combine music with technology. That's how I really became interested in electronic music and real-time systems," Rovan says.

While in residence in Paris at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/ Musique, Rovan created a glove with sensors that detect motion and acceleration of his hand. Each movement of his hand, arm or fingers produces a different musical sound through a computer. Rovan originally created the glove to use while he played the clarinet and the saxophone as a tool to manipulate the sound of both instruments with computers as he moved his hands over the keys. Now he uses the glove as an instrument all its own.

"The computer program I've written analyzes the motion of the glove and produces music according to my gestures. In a sense, the computer becomes a performer in a virtual duet," Rovan says.

He also created a composition in which dancers moved across a stage and two video cameras mounted above the stage tracked their motions, which were in turn transformed into music. This work, titled "Seine Hohle Form," won first place for interactive composition in the International Transmediale Festival in Berlin Feb. 16.

"Working with the dancers was so different because when they moved, they were not only dancing, but creating a piece of music," Rovan says. "As the audience watched them, the audience was also hearing a piece of music that had never been played before because it was being created right then."

To Rovan, technology isn't just another step toward the future of music. It's a bridge between music and the emotions expressed through human movement.

BY ALLISON YEAMAN paiswri3@unt.edu

Other featured articles in this issue:

• Regents approve engineering college, property purchase resolutions
• Governor appoints UNT alumni Beatty, Smith as new regents
• Dialing all UNT alumni
• Chancellor search advisory committee formed
• UNT students named Rotary Scholarship winners
• Women's History Month lecture to focus on women, United Nations
• Regents appoint Shrader VP for development
• Staff awards presented at president's sack lunch
• And the Academy Award goes to ...

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