CCRMA Summer Workshops:Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics

I would love to take a few summer workshops at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, CCRMA.  I took a computer music technology class back in 2003 and have longed for more. 

Here is the schedule of workshops at CCRMA, from the CCRMA website:

6/17 - 6/21   Network Sound and Data:  Juan Pablo Caceres and Carr Wilkerson
6/24 - 6/28  Intelligent Audio Systems: Foundations and Applications of Music Information Retrieval:  Jay LeBoeuf, Leigh Smith, Steve Tjoa
7/8 - 7/12      Aspects of Sound in Art: Elaine Buckholtz and Sasha Leitman
7/15 -  7/19   SuperCollider: Fernando Lopez Lezcano and Bruno Ruviaro
7/22 - 7/26    The World of Auditory and Music Perception: Takako Fujioka, Poppy Crum, Pierre Divenyi
7/29 - 8/2      Music and Mobile Computing:  Mark Cerqueira and Spencer Salazar 
8/12 - 8/16    New Music Controllers: Edgar Berdahl and Michael Gurevich
8/19 - 8/23    Stompbox Design: Edgar Berdahl and Esteban Maestre
8/26 - 8/30    3D Printing for Acoustics :  John Granzow , Marlo Kohn, Scott Summit 
9/9 - 9/13      Perceptual Audio Coding:  Marina Bosi and Rich Goldberg


Tuition is $450.00 for each workshop. More information can be found on the CCRMA site.


If you happen to be interested, CCRMA offers undergraduate and graduate university degrees.   In addition to traditional courses, such as "Musical Acoustics" and "Seminar in Music Perception", other courses are offered, such as "Future Media/Media Archaeology", "Interactive Sound Art", and "Neuroplasticity and Musical Gaming".

I'd be just as happy with a visit to IRCAM, the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics and Music in France.

AirHarp for Leap Motion, a Responsive Musical Natural User Interface

I like this demonstration of Adam Somers  AirHarp music application for use with the Leap Motion 3D controller:


AirHarp is being developed in C++ using Adam Somer's audio processing toolkit, MusKit.  This looks interesting!  Things have changes since I last took a computer music technology course (back in 2003).

Adam Somers is a senior software engineer at Universal Audio.  He has a graduate degree in music technology from Stanford, and a background in computer science, electronics, human-computer interaction, and signal processing.

Leap Motion is a motion-control software and hardware start-up company located in San Francisco, California. According to promotional information from the website, the company's first product, the Leap Motion controller, is 200 times more sensitive than existing technologies.  It will be interesting to see how this plays out.  (I'm still waiting for my pre-order.)

RELATED
AirHarp (links to GitHub)
Leap FAQs
Leap Motion Website
Leap Motion Developer Portal
Leap Motion Leadership Team
Leap Motion goes retail: Motion controller sold exclusively at Best Buy
Michael Gorman, engadget, 1/16/13

Leap Motion: Low Cost Gesture Control for your Computer Display
Asus partners up with Leap Motion, PCs with 3D motion control to debut in 2013
Michael Gorman, engadget, 1/3/13
Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics

Social Music On-the-Go - Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra; Ge Wang's SMULE apps for the iPhone

In the Charlotte Observer today, I came across an article about the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra- via the New York Times:

Musicians push edge of computer music with iPhone
Stanford orchestra turns popular songs into elaborate electronic renditions
I remembered that I'd posted about this previously nearly a year ago:  Play a flute by blowing on your iPhone!  In that post, I discussed an iPhone app by Smule called "Ocarina".  (If you follow the link to the post, you can view a video of some folks playing a version of Stairway to Heaven on their iPhones.)

Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra (MoPhO)

A bit of background information:
Smule is company started by Ge Wang, an assistant professor of music at Stanford who is the director of the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra.  He also directs the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk), and previously was involved with the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, known as PLOrk.  (Perry Cook, the author of Real Sound Synthesis for Interactive Applications, is one of the directors of PLOrk.)

Ge Wang's Ph.D. work was on ChucK, an audio programming language for "real-time synthesis, composition, performance, and analysis, supported on Mac0S X, Windows, and Linux.  To celebrate Ge Wang's thesis, Perry Cook wrote Everybody Hack ChucK Tonight (.mp3), to the tune of "Everybody Wang Chung Tonight".  The lyrics explain what the ChucK program is all about.

Ge Wang is teaching Mobile Music (Music, Computing, and Design II) at Stanford during the Spring 2010 semester. His department is affiliated with CCRMA, the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. (CCRMA offers non-credit week-long workshops each summer, open to the public. Maybe there will be a workshop on mobile music next summer!)

Enjoy the videos below:

Stanford Researcher Uses Cell Phones to Make Music

Stanford Report, March 2009

Someone posted this on YouTube for the holidays last December: