Alex Vittum is a music composer, drummer of many styles, and an electro-acoustic enthusiast. He even teaches woodshop to elementary level kids. He studied free jazz, afrocuban percussion and handdrums. His most current project is called Prism, which is his solo electro-acoustic project for percussion. He uses the software MAX MSP to create software synth presets. These presets are triggered by the audio that is received from the microphones set up on the drum kit. On the drum kit on top of the bass drum, he had a board with FSR’s, force sense resistors. These pads are velocity sensitive, and send MIDI information to MAX MSP. He links his custom presets to these pads and triggers them throughout He has been studying this idea for a few years. In his ideas he sought 3 components to process from percussive elements: timbre, amplitude, and frequency or pitch. Today he used some small condenser mics. The two inputs split into 4 channels, allowing him to set any parameter to be affected by a delay or other modulation and record to those four channels. A certain section of the audio would loop on each track, and with a designated loop time. He works very closely with Don Buchla in creating and inventing hybrid modular synths. Being close to a city with a happening music environment really gave Alex perspective and relativity on what he wanted to do when he went to grad school at Mills. It is also important as a musician to surround yourself in a community of people with a wide range of backgrounds. The 3 pieces that he performed were amazing, and I am inspired to take my electro-acoustic interests and approach to the next level of processing.