May Meeting Notice

May 2004 Meeting Notice

UC Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) research focus is on the creative interaction between music and technology. This AES chapter presentation will provide an overview of a number of recent research themes at CNMAT including the following:

- sensor systems for a new generation of musical instrumentation
- a demonstration of CNMAT’s FPGA-based connectivity processor that provides for sample accurate multiplexing of audio control data and multichannel audio
- a collection of guitar effects that exploits the connectivity processor and computer-based signal processing
- the Open Sound Control (OSC) and Sound Description Interchange Standards (SDIF)
- radiation pattern control of loudspeaker arrays

Adrian Freed's first publication in 1975 was a design for electronic doorbell with an unusally compact implementation. This wasn't a particularly powerful musical tool, but in those days access to computational machinery of any kind was exceedingly difficult and dedicated electronic circuits were the only route possible to hobbyists. He continued(unpublished) work in his teens on sound synthesizers exploring a wide gamut of hardware technologies available including a pioneering "drum machine" based on switched resistor VCA/VCF. shift register noise generator and static ram sequence storage. While at the University of New South Wales he developed control sotware for a digital additive synthesizer, the groupatron, built into the chassis of a Fairlight synthesizer. After designing a complete digital synthesizer with Vito Asta at Axis Digital in France he was invited to IRCAM by David Wessel in 1982 where he was responsible for computer systems and secretary of the Scientific Commitee. He was early to recognize the importance of temporal constraints in music systems, a theme throughout his work at CNMAT. He is author of MacMix a pioneering interactive sound editing, processing, and mixing system, commercialized by Studer-Editec. He developed hard disk audio recording technology and audio post-production user interfaces at WaveFrame . He played a major role in the design and development of the Reson8, a multiprocessor digital signal processing system for music and audio applications. He is the architect of CNMAT's Additive Synthesis System and is responsible for its UNIX implementation. He has developed the real-time scheduler used in CAST and novel signal processing algorithms for efficient sinusoidal signal synthesis, for which he holds a patent. He has made numerous contributions to the Max/MSP programming language and more recently contributed new signal processing modules . He has written and lectured on efficient use of the C and C++ programming languages for signal processing applications and was a featured speaker on the subject of integrating sound and computer graphics at SIGGRAPH 1996 . During his sabbatical leave in 2000 at Actonic Inc. he developed new applications of computational linguistics and data mining to Internet applications applied to the music portal HitsQuik.
David Wessel was educated in mathematical statistics at the University of Illinois and in a mathematical modeling approach to experimental and theoretical psychology at Stanford where he received his PhD in 1972. He then began a research program in music perception and cognition and carried out a number of experiments on the perception of timbre. Through out his high school and university careers he maintained and active role as a practicing percussionist in the jazz avant-garde.

His early influences in the computer music field were Lejaren Hiller with whom he studied at the University of Illinois and John Chowning with whom he studied at Stanford. He took up a research position at IRCAM in Paris in 1976. In 1980 he headed IRCAM's Pedagogy Department and in 1985 he established a new unit at IRCAM devoted to the development of musical software for personal computers. It was within this unit that Miller Puckette developed Max, known then as the Patcher. In 1986, Wessel along with Philippe Manoury began using Puckette's Patcher. While at IRCAM, Wessel worked directly with a variety of composers including Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Vinko Globokar, Roger Reynolds, Iannis Xenakis, Gerard Grisey, and Tristan Murail among others.

In 1985 Wessel taught the first computer music class at the Paris Conservatory. His students in that class included Marc-Andre Dalbavie and Philippe Hurel among others

In the fall of 1988, Wessel joined the Music Faculty at UC Berkeley and became Director at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) which had been founded by Richard Felciano. Since that time Wessel has remained committed to the study of music perception and cognition and the composition and performance of computer music where improvisation plays a central role. He has performed in concert with wide variety of improvising composer performers including George Lewis, Steve Lacy, Roscoe Mitchell, George Marsh, Thomas Buckner, Joelle Leandre, and Shafqat Ali Khan.

Peter Kassakian is a graduate student in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley working towards his PhD. He is applying convex optimization techniques to the problem of controlling the radiation patterns of loudspeaker arrays.

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