Klingler Electroacoustic Residency

The Klingler ElectroAcoustic Residency provides opportunities for composers to explore, experiment, and create for two weeks in Bowling Green State University's 10.2 multi-channel/first order Ambisonic studio. More recently the residency has welcomed new music new music performance ensembles , who present a concert and seminars in the fall and then return in the spring to read and record student works.

Meet our Donor Joe Klingler

Joe Klingler was born in the Great Black Swamp on a hot July day near the time of the Russian launch of Sputnik 1 that began the race into space. During elementary school he read a book entitled Four Wheel Drift that led to a soap box derby car and two crashes but no big win, and a lifelong love of motion and motorcycles even though there were no bikes in the book.

Around the time Jimi Hendrix played the U.S. National Anthem at Woodstock, he was pounding a Gibson guitar in a garage band influenced by local groups like the MC5 and Iggy and Stooges whose pioneering punk music he figured existed everywhere, though it was actually coming out of Detroit forty miles to the north.

Then he read The God Machine by Martin Caidin and started thinking about the nature of computation. And audio. And maybe someday getting a job. So he went to college to study Electrical Engineering and wrote an essay about feeling like a number for an English class before he heard Bob Seger sing about it. Years of study led to a decade of research in medical image processing, a stack of academic papers, and a few patents, which in turn led to an interest in special effects, and the software for making them. He co-founded a small startup company that was quickly acquired leading to a string of jobs for bigger and bigger companies until he was assimilated by a billion dollar enterprise and had the idea for a book—which he finally wrote while moving 525 mph bouncing between the coasts of the United States.

That book wasn’t RATS. But it led to RATS, his first novel. RATS draws on the beauty of technology, its uses, misuses and abuses. And how the collision of human ideologies shape its future—and ours.

He currently resides in California with a couple of Macs and a handful of motorcycles (striving for the Peter-Egan optimum, as described in Leanings). Sometimes he drives a car. And is fond of turbochargers.