For Dan

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Egor

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My good friend, Dan Timis, passed away yesterday. I was fortunate enough to have worked with Dan on two separate occasions over the last twenty years — at both Opcode Systems and at Muse Research. Dan was a brilliant digital audio programmer and a very clever fellow. He could see a solution to a problem before many of us even knew that a problem existed. He always had an interesting idea; another angle; or a unique take on a design.

But as much as I valued Dan as a coworker — and he was the best — I valued him far more as a friend. I’ve never met anyone with a greater enthusiasm for life. His zeal was infectious, and his hunger for knowledge was ravenous. Yet he possessed the endearing qualities of innocence, wonderment and purity that are more commonly associated with a child. Because Dan’s musical tastes were as broad and eclectic as mine, we would discuss subjects like opera and Romanian folk music the way most guys chat about football. Dan was a film and television nut so, when I moved to Canada, he immediately drafted me as a human TiVo — supplying him with a slew of Canadian television comedies he’d been wanting to see. But the thing Dan and I shared the most over the last few years was a love of photography. In fact, the week before his heart attack, I told him I was considering going back to film for street photography. Dan thought I might be losing my sanity, so it was for him that I started writing the Like a Leica series of articles for this blog.

Dan was the quintessential ‘backyard’ photographer — literally. By that, I mean his favorite subjects were whatever critter happened to wander into his or a friend’s backyard. These photos always had a certain quirky charm that made me smile. With Dan’s passing, I wanted to take my own backyard photo for him. But, since I live in a high rise, I don’t have a backyard. In fact, I don’t have a yard at all. As I looked out my condo window to contemplate how I could possibly take a ‘backyard’ photo for Dan, I saw the sky change in an instant. It burned a dark and vibrant orange for a period just long enough for me to photograph it. I’m not much for either sunset photos or romantic notions, but I like to think that Dan was responsible for this fleetingly intense show in my Vancouver “yard.” So this photo’s for you Dan. The world needs more of what you offered it.

©2009 grEGORy simpson

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Comments

4 responses to “For Dan”

  1. Susan Avatar
    Susan

    Dan was my brother-in-law, married to my husband’s sister, Anne. We loved Dan; for all the reasons stated above. His pictures of the hummingbird, the dove, and “Jeeves in a Pot” were so precious, and moving. We think of him every day, and our world will different because of him.

  2. Fabrice Guédy Avatar
    Fabrice Guédy

    I’m very sad to read these news. I knew Dan 25 years ago in Paris when he was working at Ircam. He was one of the most brilliant spirits on both music and computer science. A lot of musicians and researchers have been influenced by him, I’m one of them.

    Fabrice Guédy

  3. gerard assayag Avatar
    gerard assayag

    I am a witness of the first part of Dan’s life in the west, that is when he left Romania and landed in Paris, France in 1982, before his american life that began in late 1986.

    He attended a BSc computer science program at the Pierre et Marie Curie University. So did I, I met him there, in front of a an information panel. Why did we talk ? why did we become instantly friends ? we discovered that we were both gravitating around IRCAM, the big research facility for music and science founded by the famous director Pierre Boulez. I was as a student working on some research projects that would lead, years after to the creation of the Music Representation team where I’m still in charge. Dan was working part time in the systems team.

    There started a period of wonders and beauty.

    We used to work together in the evening and late in the night (yes, Dan was already used to program till 4 in the morning) with that big empty Ircam building as a playground.

    Dan was brillant : he reinvented computer music with new ideas all the time. The Postscript language was just showing up and he suggested we should extend the langage to a full object oriented one and use it to ease the designe and printing of music notation. We wrote three papers at the Icmc on that topic. The book “a general theory of tonal music” was becoming a hit : one evening he told me ” this is bull shit”. He took Chomsky’s theory of formal grammars and automata and found what was missing : a formal language expressing the idea of polyphonic superposition in music. Thus the “superposition grammars”, a breakthrough in music theory, and the occasion to meet Marc Chemillier who came around at that time for his Master’s internship and worked with Dan on that topic. Marc is now a recognized researcher and professor in a top french university.

    This is just a few examples of Dan’s creativity. When we were tired of working, we would go downstairs to the grand Steinway piano and Dan would play marvelous interpretations of the classical repertoire. Or we would go to an empty studio and play a CD (it was the beginnings of this technology) full power on the studio’s amps (a Mahler symphony, e.g.). Then at 3 or 4 in the morning we would go to the Pizza Pino in the quartier des Halles for a pizza in one of the all-night restaurants around.

    We were very closed and when he left for the US he left a great vacuum. But old Europe was too small for him.

    I visited him in Santa Barbara at the time he was in charge of the studio, then later when he was at Opcode. Then we lost ties. Strangely I have never stopped thinking of him. Often at ircam when a new thing pops up I say : well, my friend Dan Timis had already envisioned this in the eighties. For example, visual programming of musical processes (that became so popular with Max) was an idea he was already suggesting in 1985/1986, well before it became mainstream.

    For the birth of my son in 1986 Dan wrote a score to commemorate the event. It is a contemporary bossa nova, a nice piece he wrote overnight. I will keep it forever and this will be the unalterable link between us : his music.

  4. Morel Koren Avatar
    Morel Koren

    I got to know Dan in summer 1973 or 74 at “Musical Vacancies” – a Festival of Students in Piatra Neamt, ( http://www.piatra-neamt.net/en/index_en.php ) – a very nice city in Moldova, Rumania. Dan came from the Bucharest Music Academy ( http://unmb.ro/ ), and I came from the Iasi Music Academy ( http://www.arteiasi.ro/ ).

    After a few days of daily encounters, in these 3 weeks of musical events, Dan and I have become friends, good friends. And in the next summer festival we met again in Piatra Neamt Musical Vacancies – this time like old friends.

    In ’82, Dan attended a BSc computer science program at the Pierre et Marie Curie University ( http://www.upmc.fr/ ), worked in IRCAM ( http://www.ircam.fr ), and in ’86, crossed the Ocean to work in California as audio programmer and DSP (Digital Signal Processing) architect.

    In the last 20 years he was involved in the research and development of two patents in the field of computer application for music and in the development of many software/hardware products at Opcode (Vision), Arboretum (Hyperprism), Muse Research (Receptor) and Apple (iPod, and iPhone).

    In the last 12 years we were in email contact, and between 1999-2002 we met each other in California at Stanford ( http://ccrma.stanford.edu ), Berkeley ( http://cnmat.berkeley.edu/ ), Mountain View, Palo Alto and San Francisco. In 1999 when I was in New York at my friend Prof. Dr. Father Theodor Damian’s house, Dan invited me to visit him at Mountain View. He took me to the Opcode building, and on the next day asked Prof. Jonathan Berger for his permission to visit Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Prof. Berger has agreed to welcome us and presented some of CCRMA’s successes to us. On the next day, Dan took me to visit the Golden Bridge and the Musée Mécanique (The Zelinsky Collection coin-operated mechanical musical instruments and antique arcade machines, http://www.museemecaniquesf.com/index.php ) – that fascinated both of us.

    On July 2002, when I was in summer courses at CCRMA, Dan organized a visit to Anne’s relatives who have a horse farm ( http://ligarafarms.com/ ). It was great. The country, the holiday atmosphere, the barbeque and the most important thing, the lovely people. We celebrated then July 4 together.

    I was really happy and proud to hear that Dan works at Apple ( http://www.apple.com ), and that he invests his energy, creativity, intelligence, and time in what he loves so much.

    After a major heart attack, Dan passed away on February 3, 2009.

    … and now, dantimis@mac.com is not responding anymore. And we have deep regrets, and we are sorry for you Anne, for Dan’s parents Ben an Poli, and for all his good friends.

    … at least we can read and write memories about Dan Timis at https://ultrasomething.com/2009/02/for-dan/, at http://ligarafarms.com/DanTimis/, and at http://www.museresearch.com/dan_timis.php

    Shalom Haver

    Morel Koren,
    Bar-Ilan University, Israel

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