| Thom Blum (b. 1954, Columbus, Ohio USA) has been composing electroacoustic and computer music since 1973. He is primarily self-taught but counts as his earliest mentors Curtis Roads, James Tenney, Earl Howard, and Ingram Marshall, all of whom he met while studying composition and classical guitar at California Institute of the Arts in 1972. He has lived in San Francisco, California since 1978 and composes out of his studio In Situ.He is co-founder of The International Computer Music Association (1978), served as Associate Editor of the M.I.T. Press Journals Computer Music Journal (1987-1996), and is a member of the seven person San Francisco Tape Music Collective (2000-present).
His most recent musical activities include new releases on Bandcamp, and the completion of a 2025 electroacoustic composition titled Resilience. He has presented invited talks about his music at CREATE, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and at Art-talk Salon. And, as Artist in Residence at the Prelinger Library, he created, installed, and plays a twelve-channel sound system that reflects and interacts with the Library’s space, its contents, and the visitors roaming in the stacks. Thom Blum is also a technologist and developer. In 1992 he and three cohorts who had previously worked as researchers for Yamaha Music Technologies formed the multimedia engineering firm, Muscle Fish LLC (website snapshot from May 2000, courtesy of Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.). There they developed a technology to automatically measure the similarity of sounds. By 1999 they had been granted their first patent (now expired), developed APIs and full applications capable of audio content-based retrieval. In 2000, Muscle Fish was acquired by Audible Magic Corporation where the original Muscle Fish technology has been redirected towards the identification of full music and video. Thom Blum’s music is available through Bandcamp’s sfSoundLabel, with additional works here, Music by Thom Blum. e-mail: mohtmulb at gmail dot com |