Patrice Scanlon is an electronic musician, dancer, and recovering clarinetist working in the San Francisco Bay Area. As an undergraduate student, Patrice studied clarinet, composition and digital arts at Stetson University in Deland, Florida. She later earned an MFA in Electronic Music from Mills College in Oakland, CA where she focused her musical experiments with dancers, choreographers, and other musicians.
Scanlon often works collaboratively, recently composing music with Fred Frith (on The Happy End Problem and Imitations) for Amanda Millers The Pretty Ugly Dance Company in Freiburg, Germany. When beginning a new work, Patrice uses field recordings, studio recordings and synthesizers, which are transformed through time stretching, modulation and distortion until the ultimate timbre is achieved. As a dancer, Patrice is always searching to create musical rhythms that teeter between the familiar and the unfamiliar.
Currently the Technical Director of the Intermedia Arts Program at Mills College, Patrice also performs at local Bay Area Venues, and develops interactive systems with Max/MSP and the Cyclops object. Using a digital video camera, the images of the dancers are captured into a grid that divides the stage into zones, for example, 8 columns and 8 rows for 64 zones. When there is a difference in light, a zone triggers which then triggers a specific sample, effect and spatial location. The interaction between the dancer, the software, and Scanlons own musical improvisation generates a fluid and often poetic interplay between motion and sound.
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