Digital Preservation 001 - Lydia Ayers
ABOUT LYDIA
Composer, flutist, educator, and puppeteer (1952-2022), Lydia Ayers made music that joined earthy spirituality with technology: live flutes from around the world, computer-generated soundscapes, just intonation, and the stories carried by shadow and black-light puppets.
A life in sound
After moving to Hong Kong with her husband, computer scientist Andrew Horner, Ayers taught at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She composed for ensembles ranging from the City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong to the Da Capo Chamber Players in New York, wrote extensively for flutes, and performed on Native American, Chinese, and other world flutes from Hong Kong to Buenos Aires.
Working especially in Csound, she explored unlimited just intonation and digitally re-created Indonesian gamelan, Chinese winds, and other instruments. That work is reflected in her Albany Records album Virtual Gamelan and in Cooking with Csound: Woodwind and Brass Recipes, co-authored with Horner. Nature, food, calligraphy, and cross-cultural listening run through her titles. She also founded the puppet group Foggy Sound Garden, creating music and puppets for original shows and a production of Stravinsky’s Petrushka. Her puppet productions are preserved separately in DataSpace@HKUST: Lydia Ayers Puppet Show Productions.
Preserving her compositions
In collaboration with Prof. Andrew Horner, HKUST Library has curated a selection of Ayers’s music compositions in DataSpace@HKUST, released under a CC BY license so scores, audio, and related files remain openly available for listening, study, and performance.
EXPLORE THE COLLECTION
Each star is one composition. Cluster and color by instrument family, medium, or decade, or switch to the career timeline, then open a work to read its note and visit the preserved dataset.
Project Team
- Prof. Andrew Horner (Professor, CSE, HKUST)
- Jennifer GU (Library)
- Victoria CAPLAN (Library)
