In the video posted above, Peter wrote Hyperscore motifs for members of the early Harmony Line staff and paired them, using Perl, with the Avatar images drawn by Facemelter. The first image is M.I.T. student designer Mary Farbood, followed by Bhob Rainey, Facemelter, Richard Resnick, Garry Griffin, Sunny Chang and Henry Kaufman (who all had adorable Avatar names that shall remain unpublished unless I’m given permission to blog them here!). Peter calls this work “a combination of visual art and music in that the music was inspired both by the people and their avatar personae, which were inspired from the people as well”.
Early interests in Music Technology
Peter Torpey, New Harmony Line’s Chief Technology Officer, has been involved with Hyperscore since WAY BACK. Peter grew up interested in choir, the violin and a recorder group. In the mid 90’s, he dabbled with composition, looking especially for a technology program to compose with. In 2003, Peter met some of the students who were working on Hyperscore at a conference. He became a dedicated user of H-Lounge (an online Hyperscore Community) and was well-known to Harmony Line due to the “…over 100 bug reports I submitted”. Not surprisingly, he was invited to do Beta testing for Harmony Line from 2006-2007. He “liked the way Hyperscore thought about the process of composition” and how it used the rules of western harmony.
Media Experience Artist
Tod Machover, Professor of Music and Media, met Peter in 2007 and encouraged him to apply for Machover’s Opera of the Future Group through the M.I.T. Media Lab. Peter received his Doctorate from M.I.T. and now works as an “independent contractor providing services that span the possibilities of integrating technologies into live performance and artistic experience”. PLEASE check out his amazing work using this link: https://web.media.mit.edu/~patorpey/
Web-based Hyperscore 5
In his spare time over the last 10 years, Peter has been re-writing Hyperscore to be web-based. His goal is to create a stable web platform that evolves and won’t become obsolete as code changes. Starting in December of 2021, he began working on the back end of the web-based version with the future vendor and most looks forward to changing the instrument sets as he sorts through various sound sources. June Kinoshita, Executive Director, and I are constantly amazed at the vision and resources Peter provides for a product we all love. Thank you for sharing your time and talents, C.T.O. Torpey!
