DAVID A. JAFFE (b. 1955, New Jersey) has an international reputation as a composer, computer music researcher and music software developer. His composition "Silicon Valley Breakdown for synthesized plucked strings" has been acclaimed as a landmark of computer music by sources as diverse as Le Monde, Newsweek and Smithsonian Magazine, and has been performed in over twenty-five countries. He designed the pioneering Music Kit software at NeXT Computer and was a founder of Staccato Systems, where he created VisualAudio and the SoundMAX sound engine, used on millions of PCs worldwide. He has taught composition at Princeton University, Stanford University, Melbourne University, and the University of California at San Diego.

Jaffe has been awarded commissions by the Kronos Quartet, the Russian National Orchestra, Chanticleer and others.  His extensive catalogue includes works for orchestra, voices, chamber, and electronics, noted for their personal perspective and technological innovation. Based on interrelationships, juxtapositions, collisions, and synthesis, they combine satirical and serious elements, as well as abstract and “representational” material, and draw upon world music, popular music, jazz, and historical Western concert styles.
His music has been issued on nine CDs, including two solo CDs from Well-Tempered Productions, and has been performed by ensembles such as the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony Chamber Ensemble, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Ensemble, the Eclipse Quartet, the Alesund Quartet, the String Quartet of Buenos Aires, and the String Quartet of Argentina, as well as by Jaffe himself, who plays mandolin and violin. Since 1990, he has written extensively for the Boie-Mathews Radio Drum, in works such as “The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World” (1994) and “Racing Against Time” (2001), both of which have been broadcast in numerous countries as part of the WGBH-sponsored radio program “Art of the States.”
As a researcher, Jaffe has made seminal contributions in the areas of physical modeling synthesis, expression in computer music and architecture of music systems, for which he has been awarded several patents, as well as awards from the Bourges Festival and the International Engineering Consortium. His writings have been published in Computer Music Journal, Interface, Leonardo Music Journal and Perspectives of New Music, and in the books “The Music Machine,” “The Well-Tempered Object,” and elsewhere. 
Jaffe lives in Berkeley, California.
Included in performance of May 4, 2008