He studied with David Cope and Gordon Mumma at U.C. Santa Cruz, Morton Subotnick and Mel Powell at CalArts and John chowning at Stanford University. He is on the faculty of Brown University where he is the Director of the MacColl Studio for Electronic Music. Winkler pioneered new methods for integrating acoustic instruments with computer technology, writing software that allows a computer to analyze a live performance, and create expressive music by responding intelligently to real-time musical gestures, phrasing and tempo, rendering each performance different from one another. Snake Charmer is in three movements and was written in 1992. Each movement is designed to explore a different area of technology for interective composition. The first movement features a playful interaction between the clarinet and computer. The computer responds with variations on what it "hears,"