In 2007 I went to Vietnam to begin work on the Contemporary Music Festival; Ho Chi Minh City. While there, I decided to give a seminar on creative computing in music. The students of this seminar primarily consisted of music educators looking for a better foundation in music technology. One particular person interested me, and this was a professor of traditional Vietnamese music. He seemed to have a great interest in technology and its capabilities. He also happened to be the webmaster for the conservatories website. I was enthralled by the collision of the two worlds of traditional and the new. This was Hoang Quan; a dynamic intellectual, technologist and master Nhi player (a two string bowed instrument similar to the Chinese Erhu).
Quan and I decided to base our interaction on improvisation as we both come from traditions of improvisational performance. Our instrumentation was simple, Nhi and computer and the music is based on traditional Vietnamese melodies, played by Quan and sampled my myself.
These are the recordings from our collaboration. We plan to continue to work on this project and develop it. They are intentioanlly very quiet recordings.