Music reaches towards the science of flight in a new concert piece inspired by Robert Henry Lawrence, the first African-American astronaut. The composer presents on computer-assisted composition techniques he created for this work, including a method to derive musical lines from measurements of aerodynamic streamlines. Schumaker talks about developing this piece, which will be premiered at MIT in April as part of the Cambridge Science Fair, and places it in a larger context of related aesthetic concerns in contemporary music composition.

Contact Shauna Bush-Fenty (sfenty@mit.edu) to register.