College photographer Eli Burakian ’00 shot portraits of this year’s undergraduate and advanced-degree Marshals. Chidi Anyadike ’13, the Office of Public Affairs Whitney Campbell Intern, interviewed the graduates about their time at Dartmouth

For the full article go to Dartmouth Now.

Dartmouth 2012 digital musics grads Alexander Dupuis, Alison Mattek, and David Kant, outside Hallgarten Hall after defending their theses.

Greetings from Hallgarten Hall!

In 2012, our graduate students continued to present their research here and abroad. Jessica Thompson has shown that hemodynamic brain activity collected during music listening can predict lists of descriptive labels. She has presented this work at several conferences, including the Cognitively Based Music Information Retrieval (CogMIR) workshop, the conference of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR), and the Machine Learning and Interpretation in Neuroimaging (MLINI) workshop at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference. In December, Phillip Hermans presented a paper on goal-based music compositions in Lucca, Italy, at the 15th Generative Art Conference (GA2012). There were installations, paper sessions, live performances, lively discussion, and “lots of great Tuscan food.” In addition to live performance, Carlos Dominguez has been working on a soundtrack for the 1928 silent film, Beggars of Life, to be performed live alongside the film on February 2, 2013, at Dartmouth in conjunction with the Department of Film & Media Studies.

We are most delighted to welcome winter and spring term visiting professor, Dr. Tara Rodgers, a University of Maryland assistant professor of Women’s Studies, a distinguished faculty fellow in Digital Cultures & Creativity, and an affiliate faculty of American Studies and Musicology & Ethnomusicology. She is also the coordinator of the Women’s Studies Multimedia Studio and was a Canada-US Fulbright Scholar (2006-2007) and a visiting faculty in sound at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2004-2005). Her book, Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound, received the 2011 Pauline Alderman Book Award for outstanding scholarship on women in music from the International Alliance for Women in Music (IAWM). Rodgers’ current project is a feminist history of synthesized sound.

Professor Spencer Topel began 2013 in Copenhagen for a winter 2013 Danish International Visiting Artist (DIVA) residency to collaborate on a performance and sound installation series with the acclaimed Figura Ensemble. Digital musics faculty, Professor Larry Polansky and Professor Kui Dong, along with Professor Christian Wolff (former faculty), released a CD on Henceforth Records.

Professor Spencer Topel collaborated with studio art Professor Soo Sunny Park at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Massachusetts to create this mesmerizing light-based sculpture and soundscape entitled Capturing Resonance.

In fall 2012, Nathan Davis, director of the Performance Laboratory in Contemporary Music, appeared as a concerto soloist with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Ludovic Morlot, giving the world premiere of Dai Fujikura’s concerto, “Mina.”  As a percussionist in the International Contemporary Ensemble, he also performed at the Wiener Konzerthaus in Vienna, inaugurated a new hall in Sonoma with John Adams, and premiered a new work by John Zorn in Berlin.  Also an active composer, Davis wrote music for Morningside Lights (commissioned by Columbia University’s Miller Theatre) and performed it in New York City, together with Dartmouth Contemporary Music Lab graduate students Ryan Maguire, Phillip Hermans, and Carlos Dominguez. Davis was also awarded a 2012 commission by the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University and a recording grant from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music.

In January, Andrew Sarroff, technical director of the Bregman Music and Audio Research Studio (BMARS) received funding from the Neukom Institute for Computational Science for Dartmouth to host the two-day Northeast Music Informatics Special Interest Group (NEMESIG) 2012. Dozens of music information researchers attended and presented, and Frank Russo of Ryerson University in Toronto was the keynote speaker.

Alumni notes:

Paul Osetinsky is the chief technology officer of his new web company, Treatings, where he handles all of the coding. Treatings is a professional networking platform that makes it easy to propose informational meetings with people in local coffee shops and bars.

Beau Sievers’ (PhD student in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences) recent study about the uniquely human capacity to feel emotion through music was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study found our cognitive connection to music may have evolved from an older skill, the ability to glean emotion from motion. People will choose the same combination of spatiotemporal features—a certain speed, rhythm, and smoothness—whether pairing a particular emotion with a melody or with a cartoon animation. But most surprising, the results held true in people from two starkly different cultures: a rural village in Cambodia and a college campus in New England.

Bruno Ruviaro has just started a new job as assistant professor of music at Santa Clara University in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he is in charge of developing a new electronic music program and also teaching composition and music theory. Starting in the spring of 2013, he will be directing the newly-formed Santa Clara University Laptop Orchestra.

Christian Jaksjø works as a trombonist in the Frankfurt Radio Jazz Orchestra in Germany, as well as serving as the chief editor of Lydskrift, a Norwegian periodical on art music. Recent compositions include a work for ring modulated electromechanically amplified piano and electronic sound, commissioned by the pianist Ellen Ugelvik and released on her recent CD, Serynade (catalog number, ACD5061).

Iroro Orife is a staff engineer at Dolby Laboratories in San Francisco, working on perceptual audio codecs and audio processing for mobile devices, while continuing to run his label, de’fchild productions, releasing underground dub, techno, and experimental vibes on 12-inch vinyl with parity in the online spaces.

In fall 2012, Tae Hong Park started his new, tenured post as associate professor at New York University. He also received the 2012 Regional International Computer Music Association (ICMA) Award at the 2012 International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) and survived Hurricane Sandy in New York City this year, after surviving Hurricane Katrina at Tulane University in New Orleans in 2005!

by Rebecca Fawcett 

President Folt speaks with Graduate Student Council Vice President Justin Richardson and President Julia Bradley-Cook

On Tuesday, September 18^th, President Carol Folt held a reception for the incoming class of graduate students, welcoming them to Dartmouth in the beautifully renovated Hanover Inn. President Folt chatted with new students from all disciplines, emphasizing her excitement about the growing strength of graduate studies.

The reception was held in the beautiful Hayward Ballroom at the Hanover Inn – the first student event in the space. New Dean of Graduate Studies F. Jon Kull introduced President Folt, reminiscing about their first meeting, when then-Professor Folt was teaching ecology to undergraduates. Then President Folt assumed the podium with a smile, reflecting on her own experiences with graduate students at her undergraduate alma mater, the University of California at Santa Barbara. It was her experience with graduate students, she explained, that opened her eyes to the power of scientific research and experimentation early in her college career. The president encouraged the new graduate students to look for those opportunities to inspire others around them.

After their official greetings, President Folt, Dean Kull, and other members of the Graduate Studies staff mingled with the new students, sharing laughs about their own experiences pursuing advanced degrees and highlighting how much the administration understands the pressures and rewards of graduate studies. The president posed for pictures with students from many of the graduate programs, smiling alongside students who are just exploring Hanover for the first time (and overwhelming this photographer with requests for his email address!).

As Dartmouth’s newest graduate students filtered out of the reception hall, it was clear that the warm welcome was greatly appreciated.

Please visit the Graduate Studies Flickr page for more photos of the Presidential Reception, and stay tuned for an article highlighting the incoming members of the new graduate class.

Article and Photos by Zach Williams

For the full article go to Dartmouth Now.

From Medieval studies to neuroscience, the work of Dartmouth researchers produced more than 50 articles in August 2012. See a full list of those publications below, and follow Dartmouth research on Twitter @dartdiscovery.

For additional coverage of research activity at Dartmouth, see the Dartmouth Discovery features on books and grant awards.

For the full article, go to Dartmouth Now

Telluride at Dartmouth

Each year, six films come directly from Colorado for special advance screenings at the Hopkins Center for the Arts. This is a unique opportunity for the Dartmouth community to get a sneak peek at the latest international films—often months before they’re released.

For the full article, go to Dartmouth Now.