Brendan Bernhardt Gaffney

Instructor

Brendan Bernhardt Gaffney has been working for a decade now learning to use, teach, develop and build software, electronic and physical tools for musicians, programmers and artists.

He grew up in the northeast, where he learned carpentry and a passion for creativity from his parents. At Skidmore College, where Brendan created his own major, Sound, he worked as an engineer and builder with Peter Edwards (aka Casper Electronics), as lead recording engineer and supervisor at Skidmore College’s new $50 million Arthur Zankel Music Center, as a student and protégé of Flip Phillips in the Neuroscience department of Skidmore College, technical director of Skidmore College’s radio station, WSPN, and an extra pair of hands in his father’s wood shop.

Brendan is now pursuing a graduate degree in Computer Music, working under Miller Puckette, Tom Erbe, Tamara Smyth, Anthony Davis and others in the music department at UCSD. He is playing saxophone in the Improvisation Ensemble, a Teaching and Research Assistant in the Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts Major, and working on projects with other creative minds in the graduate program. Academically, he is focused on learning the ins and outs of DSP programming, embedded technologies, free improvisation and electronic music performance/interaction.

Today he continues his lifelong pursuit of novel methods of producing, controlling, warping and spewing sound, at once playing saxophone, guitar, computer, all the while designing, building and programming his own software and hardware.