[1] He then studied composition, orchestration, and counterpoint with Henry Brant,[2] and electronic music with Joel Chadabe at Bennington College.
Jaffe's musical approach is influenced by the American experimentalism of late composer Henry Brant (a close friend and mentor),[7] as well as that of Carl Ruggles and Charles Ives.
Jaffe draws upon a diverse range of sources, including world music, jazz and historical Western concert styles.
In 1981, Jaffe received a commission from guitarist David Starobin to write a work for eight guitars, voice and tape.
While playing the Mozart piano quartet, he mentioned to the violist, Alex Strong, that he was working on guitar synthesis.
He began extending the technique to solve problems of tuning, dynamics, expression, and many other issues in collaboration with electrical engineering PhD student Julius Smith.
Silicon Valley Breakdown also included innovations in simulated ensemble synchronization and the development of the Time Map.
The finale from the piece was included in The Digital Domain, which was created as one of the first compact discs ever made to showcase the new CD technology.
Since 1990, he has written extensively for an electronic controller called the "Radio-drum" (or Radiodrum), originally developed by Bob Boie and Max Mathews as a three-dimensional mouse at Bell Labs in New Jersey.
Jaffe and Schloss describe their approach in a number of articles, including The Computer-Extended Ensemble, published in Computer Music Journal in 1994.
The piece took its final form when Charles Amirkhanian and Other Minds joined the commission consortium, along with a grant from the James Irvine Foundation.
In his program notes Jaffe wrote that the piece "explores what can be communicated and what must remain unsaid as eight isolated string players embedded in the audience, and one percussionist alone on stage, reach out to one another.".
[27] The work was subsequently performed at Open Space in Victoria, BC, Canada (2013) and on the Wayward Music Series at the Good Shepherd Center in Seattle (2016).
[31] In the mid-1990s, he developed the sound for games such as Welcome to West Feedback, and Quest for Fame, collaborating with bands such as Aerosmith, for the Boston-based company Ahead (later Virtual Music Entertainment).
Staccato Systems was acquired by Analog Devices in 2001, where Jaffe continued as Chief Architect and developed SoundMAX (which has shipped on over 80 million PCs) and VisualAudio, presented at the 2006 Audio Engineering Society Conference in New York.
Since 2006, Jaffe has worked as a Senior Scientist/Engineer at Universal Audio, where he contributed to the development of the DSP systems used in the UAD-2, Satellite, Apollo, and RealTime Rack hardware.