Timothy Polashek Raised in Iowa and Wisconsin, Tim has lived with moderate hearing loss since birth and wears hearing aids every day. This hearing loss has become part of TimÕs musical and compositional aesthetic, prompting him to explore the world of nonsensical speech sounds as music, as well as pitch and timbre manipulations of other sounds in his electro-acoustic works. He wrote his first computer program in 5th grade to generate time-based graphic animations and, by the time he reached high school, he had written a computer program in PASCAL that could synthesize musical tones, generate improvisations in the style of jazz blues, and display them as musical notation in real-time during the computation and rendering of the music. Ever since these early experiences, he continues to apply computers and music technologies to create compositions and other musical projects with aesthetics derived from his unique listening perspective.
His electro-acoustic compositions (released by the Electric Music Collective on their albums Incandescence (2003) and Defiant (2004)) and his interactive multimedia installation, Tinkering With Speech (which debuted at New YorkÕs Lincoln Center Summer Festival in 2000), as well as his sound-poetry works series, Speakings, have all explored the musical nature of imperfect hearing and word interpretation, often with humorous overtones. His latest album, Wood and Wire (Albany Records: Troy 819), is somewhat of a departure from those works, although he still manages to incorporate interests in subtle pitch and timbral variations and brings through some of the humor as well.
As his works reveal, Tim is an accomplished pianist and composer, writing for a variety of ensembles and media, including vocal, instrumental and electro-acoustic music, text/sound compositions, and interactive performance systems. Tim is also an entertaining lecturer, Chair of the Audio Engineering Program at Gibbs College - NJ, and the former Director of the Electronic Music Center at Lehman College of the City of New York. He has lived and worked in New York City since 1996, although his music has been performed throughout the United States and in Canada, Hong Kong, Brazil, Moscow and other European countries. He has recently debuted works at New York CityÕs Merkin Concert Hall and Symphony Space, the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, the SPARK New Music Festival, the Lincoln Center Summer Festival, the American Festival of Microtonal Music, and International Computer Music Conference Festivals. The renowned new music ensemble, Speculum Musicae, has performed his music.
His research projects in audio synthesis and text/sound music are published in the Journal of the Society of Electro-Acoustic Music of the United States and the Leonardo Music Journal, published by MIT Press.
Tim received his Doctor of Musical Arts in Composition degree from Columbia University, an M.A. in Electro-Acoustic Music from Dartmouth College, and B.A. in Music from Grinnell College. He has studied composition and music theory with Jon Appleton, Jonathan Chenette, Charles Dodge, Joseph Dubiel, Brad Garton, Jonathan Kramer, Fred Lerdahl, Tristan Murail, and Larry Polansky.