• Name: Tom Figliulo
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• Country: USA
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Tom's Dog Rosie

Bio for Tom Figliulo

Thomas Richard Figliulo, originally from Chicago’s South Side, having lived in Boulder and Gilpin County in the Colorado Front Range, is now residing with his family in Lake Oswego Oregon, southwest of Portland. Tom has embarked on a journey to develop a new musical instrument using Kyma. Tom originally was a trumpet player in high school and in college and was in brass sections for local Chicago area rock and R&B bands and played in a jazz quartet. He nominally learned some keyboard skills while at Southern Illinois University and developed an interest in synthesizers there while taking a Physics course tailored for Music Majors. He later earned a BA at University of Illinois in Sociology and became a Social Worker. He changed careers again in the early eighties and became a software engineer developing a computer music language processor as one of his first projects for a training program he developed. He went on to develop technology and contributed to key software technology patents in use by StorageTek?/Sun Microsystems and IBM for the integration of disk pointer manipulation with database backup and recovery. He wrote extensively on the subject, published worldwide by IBM and STK/Sun. He has had original research published by the IEEE in 1996. Continuing his work in data base technology while Chief Database Technologist for his division at Hughes Aircraft and Raytheon Tom developed new technology for a satellite mission management system for ICO Satellite Management, LLC formerly ICO Global Communications. This was sold to NASA by Raytheon, is being used by NASA at Goddard Space Flight Center. Having learned Smalltalk as a software engineer Tom just had to get involved with Kyma. Tom also does development on a Korg OASYS using the Korg internal development tool, Synthkit. He has been on a quest for a synthesizer that is expressive as the brass instruments he used to play which led him away from keyboards to develop a system to use a guitar as a synth controller. He developed programs for the Kurzweil K2000 tailored to a guitar MIDI system and found existing MIDI applications for the guitar were too limiting for the level of expression he was after. He discovered that he really did not need process a guitar through a MIDI system if he used Kyma. He works on his “guitar as the controller” vision to this day using Kyma’s excellent pitch detection capabilities to develop synth programs for guitar. From Tom’s point of view the configuration he is playing is the entirely new musical instrument he was after. He realizes that Kyma can empower anyone to create their own instrument. No longer needing MIDI for Guitar, MIDI is relegated to “ground control” duties using 7 pedals and a bank of 10 footswitches. He processes each string individually with a hex pickup system with outputs for each string adapting Kyma to be a 6 voice synthesizer and is rapidly running out of DSP. In addition to music, Tom still works on software engineering projects, writes, meditates, and enjoys Oregon’s outdoors and spending time with his family.

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Thomas Anthony Figliulo

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