Frank Baldé

Born 1956 in Delft, the Netherlands. Lives in a little village near Amsterdam. He has been making music since he was 7 years old. After his technical studies and playing in numerous pop groups he joined Steim Foundation in Amsterdam in 1985 and started his work as software designer. A big influence has been and still is, the close collaboration with Michel Waisvisz, the artistic director of Steim which resulted in a number of music programs for live performance.

In 1988 one of his music programs, MidiDraw was published by the American software company Intelligent Music.

At Steim he created amongst others 'Deviator', a midi processing program for the Atari ST and together with Michel Waisvisz a program called 'The Lick Machine', realtime midi manipulation software for the Atari ST and the Apple Machintosh. The last years he has been working on a software sampling package called 'LiSa' for the Apple PowerMacintosh computers and recently on a new software program called junXion, which translates USB input device data into MIDI.

With LiSa the computer becomes a powerful 'sampler' with a lot of real-time manipulation possibilities. Michel Waisvisz and Frank Baldé have been using this software live on stage for a number of years now in Michel Waisvisz's pieces 'Operation LiSa', 'The spirit of the digital Djembé’, 'Muta Lobo’ and ‘Cataton’. A lot of other performers, composers are also using LiSa on stage and or studio.

Frank Baldé is software designer at Steim. He also teaches at the Sonology department of the Royal Conservatory in the Hague. The last two years he has done major development work on junXion, which now has become a very powerful tool to configure, reroute and process all sorts of input data like from joysticks, touchscreens, midi keyboards, open sound control messages, etc. into other MIDI and OSC data to control (mostly) audio software.

The software combo junXion/LiSa is also used in most of Steim's Touch exhibition instruments. Together with Michel Waisvisz he has created a number of interactive music installations that can be played by anybody from 7 to 77 years of age. This exhibition has travelled to a various places around the world and always been very succesful. Currently Waisvisz and Baldé are creating a couple of new musical objects for the exhibition using Steim's soft-and hardware technology.