Nick Didkovsky

Nick Didkovsky is a guitarist, composer, teacher, and computer music programmer. Since 1989, Didkovsky has used a computer to produce fully orchestrated music for his band, Doctor Nerve. He has presented papers on his work at conferences and has served in-residence at the Mills College Center for Contemporary Music and at Dartmouth College. Didkovsky studied electronic music with composers Christian Wolff (Dartmouth College) and Gerald Shapiro (Brown University), and received a Masters Degree in computer music from New York University in 1987. Didkovsky has performed with Fred Frith's Guitar Quartet and John Zorn's New Traditions in East Asian Bar Bands. His work has been featured at Manhattan's Bang On A Can Festival.

The CD Transforms: The Nerve Event Project came about as a result of 44 "Nerve Events" on the Doctor Nerve CD, Beta 14 Ok. The Nerve Events are sound events of two to six seconds in duration, which listeners are encouraged to program on their CD players, thus participating in the making of music. After Jason Willett and Steve MacLean sent Didkovsky pieces they had composed with the events, Didkovsky decided to commission over 20 other artists to submit works built on the Nerve Events. The means ranged from custom digital signal processing and computer manipulation to low-tech sampling and multi-track recording. Artists included Ted Apel, Thomas Dimuzio, Dave Douglas, Tom Erbe, Mark Howell, Henry Kaiser, Henry Lowengard, Ray Guillette, and Larry Polansky.