Elizabeth Hoffman (USA), a composer of acoustic and electronic music, has studied with Diane Thome and Richard Karpen. She holds a master's degree in composition from SUNY Stony Brook where she studied with Bulent Arel. Hoffman is a 1994 winner of the Bourges Grands Prix Internatlonaux de Musique Electroacoustique.

"Tesserae", realized on a NeXT 68040 computer, is composed of sounds synthesized with the Csound and Common Lisp languages. Software used was the RT: realtime mixer, 1993, V3.0 by K. Dickey and P. Lansky; Ipanal (linear predictive analysis for the Csound Ip generators), a modification of P. Lansky's Ipc analysis programs; and soundwarp, a unit generator developed by R. Karpen. Peripheral equipment used was a Singular Solutions A/D64X analog/ digital converter, a Panasonic sv-3700 DAT deck, and a Nakamichi DR-2 cassette deck.

This single-movement work emerged from numerous mosaic-like bits, tesserae. The techniques used to create most of the related sounds, however, were widely divergent. Such techniques include additive synthesis, ring modulation, filtering, and linear predictive analysis. Many of the sounds heard in this piece are reminiscent of natural sounds, because the tape sounds were generated by linear predictive analysis techniques. The sampled words "voices" and "lucy" were the starting point of a few important musical elements. Lucy's own sampled speech (purring), for example, was the filter excitation source for one bit of musical material.