Brad Garton (Dow Jones and the Industrials)

Brad Garton – Composer, computer programmer, and former punk musician. The son of Robert Garton (a member of the Indiana state senate for over thirty years), Brad Garton was raised in Columbus, Indiana, and majored in Pharmacology at Purdue, where he played keyboards and provided sound effects for a local punk band called Dow Jones and the Industrials. Together for only a few years in the late ‘70s to the early ‘80s, Dow Jones and the Industrials recorded a couple records including Hoosier Hysteria, a joint LP with the Bloomington-based Gizmos. Known back then as “Mr. Science,” Garton founded Zounds Productions in 1977 along with Richard K. Thomas, who still runs the company. Although Zounds specializes in sound production for live theater, they also recorded and produced for regional punk bands in the early days. The bands included Dow Jones and the Industrials, The Dancing Cigarettes, The Jetsons, The Last (4) Digits, The Panics, The Torpedoes, and Amoebas in Chaos. After a stint in Purdue’s graduate program in Speech and Hearing Science, Garton spent several years working with local governments on developing noise control programs thanks to a grant from the Indiana Association of Cities and Towns. Eager to return to his true passion, he moved east to study music at Princeton University, where he completed a doctorate in composition in 1989 with focus on computer music. Currently, he is the director of Columbia University’s Electronic Music Center, formerly known as the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. Among the many computer music applications he has developed is Real-Time C-mix, a music synthesis and processing language for real-time composition. Real-Time C-Mix evolved from Mix, which was written in 1978 by Paul Lansky, Garton’s mentor at Princeton. In the mid 1990, Garton and David Topper added the real-time component of the language.