And so it begins…

Please allow me to introduce myself.  I’m Tom Butcher, and I have kept interests in music, sounds, electronics, software, and the myriad grey areas between for as long as I can remember.  While I admit to blogging before in a past life (we all can maintain parallel histories on the Internet, it turns out), this time around I want to focus on new directions in and interesting ideas with music technology.

A bit about me: I’ve been a musician and composer for a count of years I hesitate to admit.  In 2003, the German record label Force Inc. Music Works released my debut album Style Encoding, and one can find other releases from me both before and after as other incarnations.

I began fusing music and technology together at an early age; I was fascinated by analog synthesizer sounds and tape-splicing music before I really understood what concept-oriented music was really about.  I always wanted a vocoder as a kid (check that one off the list, three times over), and some of my fondest memories of my childhood were the gratifying successes of building strange noise generators using a breadboard, some chips, and a healthy measure of curiosity.

When I entered the professional world, I developed interactive television technology for Microsoft, and since then (fast forward through late-1990s Internet startup land) I have been working on social media processing algorithms, recommendation engines, and other various projects for MSN and Zune, where I currently work.  (Plug: I think we have some really fun music features slated for the next Zune release, but I’ll save those for another post)

That said, here’s to a new beginning.  The world of music technology has exploded over the course of the past decade, and I have loved being part of the revolution.  New technology is enabling many more people to become more intimate with music than ever before.  Of course, many of us carry more music with us in our digital devices than we could ever hope to listen to in one sitting.  The abundance of so much music and so much new data presents new challenges and new opportunities.  Let’s dive in, shall we?