Charles Dodge
Charles Dodge is an American composer, born in Ames, Iowa, in 1942, and one of the early figures of computer music. He studied at the University of Iowa and Columbia University and later worked with Godfrey Winham at Princeton. Dodge is best known for his synthesized and resynthesized voices, heard in Speech Songs, and for Any Resemblance Is Purely Coincidental, where a live pianist plays alongside a reworked recording of Enrico Caruso.
Synthesized Voices
DINTE reissues Charles Dodge’s 1976 LP collection of synthesised speech music, 1972-1975. Using mainframe computers at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Dodge analysed and dismantled audio recordings of surrealist poetry by Mark Strand, mathematically and meticulously reconstructing them in synthetic form, resulting in these uncanny, landmark pieces that spearheaded early computer speech synthesis as a form for musical composition.
A Retrospective (1977-2009)
The music on this disc was written over a period of more than thirty years. Over the course of those years, so much has changed in technology, in music, in life in general. But throughout the work represented here one can recognize the remarkable, entirely original voice of Charles Dodge (b. 1942). He is truly a composer who writes music that does not sound like anybody else's. He has never been part of any “ism” or movement; he is his own category. And although his stylistic approach and his…