Roberto Morales Manzanares
PhD. in Composition from the University of California Berkeley, his interests are focused on real-time composition, composition generated from mathematical models, applied learning systems in audio and video generated by computers, gesture capturing, real-time image and sound processing, dissemination and teaching in composition and electronic art.
As a composer, he has written music for theatre, dance, movies, TV and radio, been commissioned and participated in festivals like “Foro Internacional de Musica Nueva, Festival Internacional Cervantino, ICMC (International Computer Music Conference) and CIM (Contemporary Improvised Music Festival) among others.
As an interpreter, Morales-Manzanares has participated on his own and with other composers in forums of Jazz, Popular, Folkloric and New Music in Mexico, Latin-America, USA and Europe.
As a researcher, he has been invited to different national and international conferences such as ICMC, International Join Conference on Artificial Intelligence IJCAI and Symposium on Arts and Technology and has several publications.
In 1988, he was co-founder of the first computer music studio in Mexico at the Escuela Superior de Musica.
He has been invited as a composer in residence at: the Center for New Music Art and Technology CNMAT in UC Berkeley, San Jose State University, Center for Research in Computing and the Arts CRCA in UC San Diego, Yale University in US, McGill University in Canada and Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie ZKM in Germany. Places where he performed his work as composer and showed his computer program Escamol, an alternative for algorithmic composition.
He has organized, founded and directed the international festivals “La Computadora y la Música” (The Computer and Music) through INBA, “Callejón del Ruido Composition, ideas and technology”, through the University of Guanajuato and Transito_MX04 through CENART.
He recently has been a Tinker professor at Stanford University and is currently part of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores.
Servicio a Domicillio
This work was composed in 1991 and premiered at the Cervantino International Festival by the author that same year.
The structure of the composition was generated with a non-deterministic finite automaton of seven states based on the example of finite automata proposed by Ivan Bratko in his book Prolog Programming for Artificial Intelligence. Each state contains a different set of generative rules and the transitions between states depend on the transition rules previously established in each one.
The software that was used for the piece is written in the programming language Prolog and is the first version of my algorithmic composition environment called Escamol. The piece begins with a cadenza based on the musical material generated by both the composer and the computer and then the written part of the score is played. ThIS version of “Servicio a Domicilio”, is from the pianist and composer Keith Kirchoff and is part of his wonderful project “The Electro-acoustic Piano volume one”