As a cellist plucks at the string, sound waves reverberate into the microphone toward the audience. Behind the musician is a table, where Alex Klein, CC '12, sits as he manipulates the sound of the cello with his computer. Klein wrote a piece for cello and electronics called "The Edge" this year. Around campus, Klein is known for his use of electronics in his musical compositions, as well as his DJing. Driven by his interest in what he calls the divide between pop music and chamber music, Klein is wary of the distance between the two musical worlds and has been composing music for two years. While he doubts that bridging the gap is actually possible, Klein likes to use his compositions to explore bringing elements from one genre to the other. He is also interested in the psychological and artistic implications of transferring those elements. Musical genres, he explains, are "not black and white." Although he mainly composes chamber music and only recently started using technology in his music, Klein regards the electronic part of his pieces as a second instrument. Although electronics are used frequently nowadays in playing and recording music, sounds are often prerecorded, or technology is used to distort sounds. But in "The Edge," the cellist is one player, and the electronic part operates as a second. The piece is really for two musicians, and all the sounds that the audience hears in a single performance are played during that performance—nothing is prerecorded. Klein says performing the piece's electronics is "a very active part" because one is "constantly changing the sound." One of the many fascinating aspects of combining technology with music is the ability to "mess with sound to make it stranger," he said. As intellectual as composing music can seem, Klein describes his writing instead as "intuitive," with more of an "emotional core." A lot of his ideas focus on dreams and old memories. "I like to think of my music as a soundtrack to dreams," he said. With such an emotional basis for his ideas, Klein ignores conventional harmony and melody in composition, instead taking a much more textural approach to writing. By juxtaposing textures on top of each other, he then creates the harmony and melody. One unorthodox textural approach that Klein takes, for example, is in his recently composed "Nightlight Ocean" for orchestra, where on occasion the string instrument performers use their bows to rub the strings back and forth parallel to the direction of the string, rather than perpendicularly across the string. "I like subverting the usual uses of orchestras," Klein said. While pursuing his own creative goals, Klein plays both piano and viola, and manages to remain an active member of Columbia's music scene, studying composition and participating in the Columbia University Orchestra and Columbia New Music, a group of undergraduate composers. Whether Klein's music will pave a new future path for music is unknown—but he is certainly making a splash by bringing two worlds together.