Ami Radunskaya

Ami Radunskaya is an American mathematician, composer, and cellist specializing in new music who currently serves as a professor of mathematics at Pomona College. Radunskaya received her Bachelor's in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1986, followed by Ph.D. at Stanford University in 1992. After postdoctoral studies at Rice University, she joined the Pomona College faculty in 1994. Ami began playing cello at nine and performed with the Oakland Symphony Orchestra for seven years, joining when she was 16, right after graduating from high school. Radunskaya quit the orchestra to focus on experimental and electroacoustic music. She was a member of The Arch Ensemble for Experimental Music, co-founded by Robert Hughes (2) and Thomas Buckner. In the late 1970s, she performed throughout the United States and Europe with Donald Buchla, who built a custom Buchla 200 series synthesizer for her circa 1978–79 — retuned to her voice and interactively responsive to the performer's gestures. Dubbed the "Sili-Con Cello" after one of Radunskaya's compositions, it housed five modules in a 24"x18" wall-hanging case: Quad Function Generator 281, Quad Lowpass Gate 292C, "Source of Uncertainty" 266, Complex Wave Generator 259, and Preamplifier 270, plus a prototype A.I. binary counter. With a microphone connected through a preamp and envelope generator, Sili-Con generates CV and gate signals from acoustic sounds, used by the binary counter to "play" the synth. During her Stanford tenure, Radunskaya also composed four pieces for Radio Baton controller developed by Max Mathews, which monitors arm gestures and uses them to "conduct" music electronically. One of these compositions, "A Wild and Reckless Place" (1990), was written in the Bohlen-Pierce scale.