John Fitch
Department of Computer Science
(Formerly Computing Group, Department of Mathematical Sciences)

(Formerly the School of Mathematical Sciences)

Under construction (maybe)

The question as to whether I will ever finish this construction is one buried deep in problems as to whether I think it is useful to have such a page. To what use will the information be put? Will it add to the sum of human happiness? These are just some of the questions which are raised.

Quick links: Electro-acoustic Music, Other music, Computer Algebra, Quality Compilation, Politics, My music, Vegetarians and if you want to offer me a job my Curriculum Vitae.

Relevant Alternatives to John Fitch

Pointers to useful alternative pages include:

Media Technology Research Centre

John Fitch is a member of the Media Technology Research Centre

Electro-acoustic Music

Csound Information
Csound files for Windows, DOS, Mac68K and PowerMac, and others, with documentations files, examples and all
Composers' Desktop Project
Digital Music Research Group, University of Bristol
IRCAM
Computer Music Journal
ICMA Library

Other Music

Interesting musical information

Links to pages of other living musicians

Links to pages for dead musicians

Computer Algebra

Codemist, with whom I am associated develops and markets algebraic software, including REDUCE Algebra System
REDUCE Algebra System
Computer Algebra in general

Quality Compilation

I have both research and commercial interests in compilation.

Cambridge LISP had a compiler developed from the Hearn-Griss compiler. Unfortunately there are few implementations still in use, but this remains my favourite LISP -- the semantics were what I wanted.
Compilation for parallelism has been the topic of a number of papers by me and my students.
Codemist Ltd is a creator of quality C compilers, mainly for manufacturers. Their compiler is often called Norcroft C.
I have also worked on Fortran and C++ compilation.
Of special interest is instruction scheduling and code-generation.

General Interest

A Collection of the Tasteless

The following links are of much more dubious value, and may indeed be of even less interest than John Fitch. Any comments on these fragments can be send to him by mail.

John ffitch as Composer

The complete catalogue is being constructed elsewhere. As I have time the material here will migrate to the new catalog.

Voice in the Machine

The Voice in the Machine was a weekend course given by Richard Dobson and John Fitch in December 1994 as part of the Community Courses of the University of Bath. This work is a collage, assembled by John Fitch, of the students' work. (Unfortunately I do not have the names of all the composers). The sound quality of this down-sampled version is not good.

Collage 8KHz 110s 858Kb

Tape works

There is only a small body of completed works described here

Composer's Biography
Drums and Different Canons #1 is a stereo tape work written in Csound, lasting 7mins. More information can be found here
Half a Beast is a stereo tape work written in Csound lasting just 60secs.
- This was written as an identity piece for ICMC'96; see the Program Note
- The AIFF sound file is available for listening
- The Orchestra and the Score
- This piece received its premier at the City Hall, Hong Kong on 22 August 1996.

For Fabienne

A short piano work, written in 1964 for Fabienne Thain, and recently revised. It was written to be played on a real piano, but as I cannot play, this is created by Csound and a sampled piano.

Prelude (extract) 8KHz 20.34s 318KMb
Prelude 8KHz 131s 2Mb
Prelude (as MIDI file)

Singing in the Bath

A CD of music from Bath, including the pieces above, have been created and is available for money from me. There are 14 tracks, including music by Peter Cook, John ffitch and Jeremy Leach. More details can be found elsewhere.

Vegetarian Links

I am the administrator of one of the vegetarian mailing lists, veggie@lists.bath.ac.uk, and am also a recipient of other vegetarian lists. From this it should come as no surprise to you to discover that I am a vegetarian. As a service to many of my friends, here are some links to vegetarian resources.

Vegetarian Society of the United Kingdom is a good general information source.
Veggie mailing list: to join send an empty message. If that fails or you have trouble, send mail to me.
VEGAN-L is a mailing list for vegans and aspiring vegans. To join send the message subscribe vegan-l Your_name.
UK Veggies list.
Demuth's, Bath, The best vegetarian restaurant I know.
Tony Weston, who used to run Taigh-na-Mara, nr Ullapool, which was unquestionably the best guest house in Britain, veggie or otherwise.

And finally.....

Some addresses and links you do NOT want to follow

Last modified: Tue Oct 25 20:35:31 BST 2005

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