Harris Wulfson was a Jewish composer

Composer

A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...

, instrumentalist and software engineer living in Brooklyn

Brooklyn

Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, with nearly 2.6 million residents, and the second-largest in area. Since 1896, Brooklyn has had the same boundaries as Kings County, which is now the most populous county in New York State and the second-most densely populated...

, New York. His work employs algorithmic processes and gestural controllers to explore the boundary where humans encounter their machines.

He was involved in the creation of various custom software tools called Automatic Notation Generators (ANGs) developed to aid in the creation of algorithmic instrumental compositions. His writing on live generated music notation has been presented at the New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference, and in August 2007, he spoke on the topic of ANGs at the International Computer Music Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

For the 2006 Look and Listen Festival in New York City, Harris Wulfson presented his SensorBall, a small electronic device, slightly larger than a baseball, with pressure-sensitive controls, all wired to a laptop computer and the results channeled through loudspeakers. When pressed and rotated, the ball produces sounds that erupt apparently without pattern.

Harris graduated from Amherst College and later received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. His teachers have included Stephen Mosko, Morton Subotnick, James Tenney and Lew Spratlan.

Harris was also an accomplished violinist, accordionist, and mandolin player, an active performer of experimental music, and an avid folk musician. He was a member of the Object Collection ensemble and the Society of Automatic Music Notators, and has performed with the World on a String band, King Wilkie, Metropolitan Klezmer, Golem, and Margot Leverett.

You can find samples of Wulfson's compositions at http://wulfson.com

In addition, Harris was a software engineer and web pioneer. Harris was the technical project manager at N2K Inc. from August,1996 through March 1998. He built the bulletin board for jazzcentralstation.com and was the creator of "The Empty Chair."

Harris died on July 23, 2008. In December 2008, Scrapple Records issued a recording of Jeremy Woodruff's Tunebook A as realized by the AB Duo (Seth Meicht and Jeremy Woodruff on saxophones and flute), a work dedicated to Wulfson.