Barry Truax

Barry Truax (b. 1947) studied under Gottfried Michael Koenig and Otto Laske in Europe, experimenting with FM synthesis, before joining R. Murray Schafer’s World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University in 1973, later editing its Handbook for Acoustic Ecology. His soundscape compositions build recognizable environmental recordings into structured, associative listening experiences extending Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète toward an explicitly ecological aesthetic — carrying the WSP’s concern for the acoustic environment into a computational compositional method. In 1986 he developed the GSX system at SFU, the first real-time implementation of granular synthesis — manipulating thousands of extremely short sound grains (10–50 milliseconds each) — used on his best-known work, Riverrun (1986), and later on Wings of Nike (1987) and Tongues of Angels (1988).