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| Tim Doyle's music could be described as "long-form fractal ambient." Any tags, however, are inadequate to the task of explaining the music. This brief introduction may help.
He was born Feb. 12, 1949 in St. Cloud, Minnesota, the oldest of nine children, and spent his childhood in a rural setting on a heavily wooded lake.
He has been making music in one form or another since childhood, when he soloed in a performance of his piano concerto "Rhapsody #1" at age 9 in a school production, and had a band piece called "Rough Draft" performed a few years later.
He turned to jazz and blues piano in his teens, but although he studied music theory and composition, he majored in mathematics, his first love, receiving his B.A. in 1968. He was always intrigued by the connections between music and math, and made some early experiments at computer composition in the late sixties.
His love for jazz deepened when he discovered the Blue Note catalog at age 20, starting with Jimmy Smith, Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, Lee Morgan, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Bill Evans. He still plays keyboard in various styles, but has not recorded his improvised music.
In 1999, he ran across a relatively simple fractal music generative program called Musinum, created by Dr. Lars Kindermann in Germany, who left it available as freeware and then moved on to other projects. Most of the sample music created by Musinum users was brief and (with a few notable exceptions) primitive, but the power inherent in the algorithms employed intrigued Doyle.
He began to create a body of work of increasing intricacy and emotional content, now numbering over 200 works, most of them an hour in length. When his first Netlabel release "Escape from Lhasa" on Treetrunk Records garnered just under 1,000 downloads on its release date and over 3,000 the first week, he realized there was an audience for his music, despite its unfashionable length. (A number of pieces have since been used as radio background.)
He has worked nearly thirty years as a computer programmer, and lives in Fairfield, California, not far from San Francisco, where he lived for over a quarter of a century. Most of his siblings and his younger son also make music in one form or another.
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