I started off with a page on Erbe-Verb, which (obviously) Erbe had created, and the more I looked the more I felt like I wanted to keep more information on his work around, so we’re making a Tom Erbe page. It’s the first biography page on this site!

  • Erbe-Verb - An amazing reverb Erbe created.
  • Spectra - The project I was working on that led me to finding out about Erbe in the first place.

Info

As background, Tom Erbe is a professor at UCSD and designs digital modules for Make Noise Music (per his UCSD page and Twitter Bio). He also had published papers or had some affiliation with the UCSB Media Arts and Technology program, which may or may not end up getting its own research page soon (because it seems very cool). He has a blog which also seems worth exploration.

Erbe’s “Notable Work” section (on the About page of his blog) is absolutely ridiculous – he’s been the only person to recreate John Cage’s “Williams Mix”, created software that made the sound of The Matrix possible, and worked with NASA to make their communications clearer. It’s an insane resume. Also, look at his Classes section, which has a great range of assignments, PD patches, and other materials.


Work To Check Out

  • A Talk Erbe Gave on How He Made Erbe-Verb (more interesting than it sounds)
  • Erbe’s Classes Blog Section:
    • Has syllabi, assignments, PD patches, and other great materials on computer music.
  • SoundHack:
    • SoundHack was the software Erbe wrote which made the music of The Matrix possible (as referenced above), but the site now has a lot of great plugins, etc. (especially of note is the Freeware section which includes some PD Externals).

OK so I was trying to make my rendition of “Spectra” (see this QuickNote for the idea I had and then this research page for Atom Tone for the work of someone with a similar idea, and then this page for the actual project), in PureData, and was trying to figure out how to add reverb.

I then discovered that the actual Erbe-Verb physical module (a beautiful thing being sold on a very cool website) was $489, and that mostly people using PureData were excited about these talks the creator Tom Erbe had given.