Grad News Forum

The Hop’s year-long “Best In Show” series of weekend-long tributes to great film festivals continues with  the Pordenone (Italy) Silent Film Festival on February 1-3.

The program will feature two films accompanied by those hyperactive Pied Pipers of silent cinema soundscaping, the Alloy Orchestra; two accompanied by the Hop’s resident keyboard-film-accompaniment master Bob Merrill; and one by a score composed by Carlos Dominguez, a student in Dartmouth’s Masters Program in Digital Musics.

The weekend celebrates the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, from Italy, which since its creation in 1982 has established itself as the leading international event dedicated to the preservation, diffusion, and study of the first thirty years of cinema. Every year in October, upwards of 1,000 visitors from across the world, ranging from academics, archivists and critics to private enthusiasts and collectors, gather for a weekly marathon of screenings. At the Hop, Pordenone co-founder Paolo Cherchi Usai—a pioneer in film preservation and currently the Senior Curator of Motion Pictures and Director of the Rochester, NY, George Eastman House’s L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation—will present a curated selection from recent festivals.

For the full article see the Hopkins Center news.

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 

Students David Kant and Alex Dupuis perform at Fuel concert, October 2011

This exceptional group at Hallgarten hit the ground running, driving and flying to share their hard work and talent. In the fall, grad students organized concerts; their “Green Orpheus” performance (consisting of all six grad students) at Fuel was a big hit, followed by the concert  ”MIDI JAMS”.  In New York, David Kant started a concert series called Transient Music . The January concert featured his “Happy Valley Band” with Alex Dupuis on guitar. Alex premiered a new piece “All Hail the Dawn” at the New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference in Oslo, and “Omaggio a Berberian” at ISMIR 2011 in October. In November, Ryan Maguire was invited to give a guest lecture on Electronic Music Composition at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, where his new work ‘Pivot’ for violin, flute, clarinet, cello and electronics was given its mid-Atlantic premiere.

Several students participated in the Music Hack Days in Montreal and Boston, and the entire Digital Musics program traveled to the October ISMIR 2011 Conference in Miami, Fl, where many presented papers or pieces. Jessica Thompson presented her poster “Searching the Liber Usualis: Using CouchDB and ElasticSearch to query graphical music documents”, she also traveled to Sierra Nevada, Spain in December 2011, where she and Prof. Michael Casey presented their paper “Timbre Population Codes for High-Level Categorization of Music” at a NIPS workshop on Machine Learning and Interpretation in Neuroimaging.

Prof. Michael Casey, Chair of the Department of Music and Director of the Bregman Music and Audio Research Studio, received a Faculty Research Award from Google Inc. The funding supports “Search by Groove,” a new music search engine that uses rhythm/groove to find related recordings in large music collections. The grant will facilitate close collaboration between the Department of Music, the Department of Computer Science, and Google Labs; it will also provide support for computer science PhD students who work with Casey in the Bregman Laboratory. In addition to primary investigator Casey, the research team includes Spencer Topel, lecturer and research assistant in the Department of Music, and computer science PhD students Qingyuan Kong and Andy Sarroff. Andy is a PhD student in the Computer Science Department and currently a graduate fellow of the Neukom Institute for Computational Science—he joined the Bregman team to pursue doctoral studies in computation of produced music recordings. He is working on music groove extraction and spatial characterization of recorded music.

Prof. Kui Dong is working on a 65-minute chamber opera “HuTong”, which will be produced by Real Time opera in collaboration with Cleveland Pubic Theatre and Oberlin Conservatory in the 2013-2014 seasons. The commission is funded by Argosy Foundation Contemporary Music Fund. Arditti Quartet in Germany premiered her new quartet “Difference With Oneness” last summer.

Faculty member Larry Polansky is teaching at UC Santa Cruz this year, courses in composition and algorithmic composition, while supervising PhD students. After a busy summer in which he performed and had his pieces played over the course of 4 concerts in one week at The Stone in NYC, Larry was a guest composer in residence at the Ostrava New Music Days festival in the Czech Republic. In October, he was the keynote speaker at a festival/conference in Ghent, Belgium, hosted by the Orpheus Institute. He is also editing a major book of theoretical essays, by the composer and theorist James Tenney, for the University of Illinois Press.

ALUMNI NOTES:

Beau Sievers (GR ’10) won the prestigious Jefferson Fellowship to pursue a PhD in Music at the University of Virginia. Based solely on merit, the Fellowship provides full tuition, research funds up to $7,500 and an annual living stipend of $30,000 for five years—it rewards not only academic excellence, but also promotes graduate students who have outstanding teaching abilities and a commitment to university leadership. Beau distinguished himself by presenting research undertaken on cross-cultural emotion during an extended stay in Cambodia.

Kristina Wolfe (GR ’09) recently started her PhD at Brown in computer music.

Irina Escalante Chernova (GR ’05) and colleague Dr. Marc Gilley are working on a new project for saxophone and electronics. The piece will be performed at the University of St. Andrews celebration of the 2012 World Saxophone Congress XVI.

Ko Umezaki (GR ’93) recently returned from a trip to Japan where he and the string quartet Brooklyn Rider performed at a Buddhist temple (Jifukuji) located in the destruction zone of Kesennuma city, the region hardest hit from the 2011 tsunami. Among the works performed was the piece commissioned by Dartmouth’s Music Department and the Hopkins Center, “(Cycles) what falls must rise.”

It was an exciting year for Digital Musics, students, faculty, and alumni–we look forward to another great year in 2012!

by Rebecca Fawcett

Oftentimes, music groups work solos into their songs to give individual performers the chance to improvise. Larry Polansky, the Jacob H. Strauss 1922 professor in music, composed a music piece that does the reverse — the performers of his piece can play whatever they want, with however many musicians and whichever instruments they choose, as long as one of the instruments adheres to the score at any given point of the entire piece.

Read the full article from the The Dartmouth.

Kevin Rogers

Violinist Kevin Rogers performed Digital Musics graduate student Alex Wroten’s newest piece, “Knockoffs,” at the Hot Air Music Festival at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music on Sunday, February 6, 2011. Wroten’s piece juxtaposes a variety of pre-rendered synthesized and sampled electronic violin timbres with live acoustic violin performance to explore the relationship between “real” and “fake” violin sounds.

Rogers premiered “Knockoffs” on Friday, January 21, 2011 for his own Masters degree recital at Kaleidoscope Free Speech Zone in San Francisco. Wroten attended this premiere and documented the performance, which you can view below.

by Alex Wroten

Visit Wroten’s website.

Alison Mattek

Greetings from the digital musics department! This year has been marked by significant academic accomplishments, as well as cutting-edge, electro-acoustic research. Program Director Michael Casey ’92, presented his research at the Bregman Music and Audio Research Studio at ISMIR in Utrecht, the Stanford University hearing Seminar, Google Research in Mountainview CA, and Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering. He continues to develop both OMRAS2 music information tools, and his own MIR scripting language, pyMARSB. More information is available on his website, www.music.dartmouth.edu/~bmars.

Recently, Technology Director Spencer Topel was the co-curator of the Alternative Events concert at ICMC 2010, which included a performance by the Voxare Quartet. In 2011, Topel’s music will be featured by the MATA Interval Series and in Fresh Ink, a broadcast hosted by the Society for New Music. Joshua Hudelson ’11 is conducting ethnographic research on a community of Americans who use recording and transmission technologies to communicate with the spirits of the dead. He is also developing software tools for tracking, sonifying, and manipulating typing patterns as compositional material.

Alexander Wroten ’11 is developing three video games and plans on examining their intrinsic musicality.

Alexander Dupuis ’12 had his audiovisual improvisation piece “/Ramus /” performed at ICMC 2010 at Stony Brook University, and premiered “/Tree of Aeons /” at the Pixilerations festival in Providence, RI, in October.

David Kant ’12 had a solo show at The Incubator Arts Project in NY, where he also collaborated with composer Yoon Ji Lee at The Stone.

Alison Mattek ’12 recently published her paper, Revisiting Cagean Composition Methodology with a Modern Computational Implementation at NIME 2010 in Sydney, Australia.

The department’s graduate students recently started a band called Gravies and the Main Dish Sauce, and had their inaugural performance in November. Also, the bassoon quintet Dark In the Song premiered “Soon to be Replaced” in Columbia, SC.

Michael Chinen ’09 is in Berlin, working on sonification projects with a group called the Institute for Algorhythmics. The group looks at algorithms, signals, and computer architecture and tries to enunciate the similarities in musical compositions. Visit the group’s website at www.algorhythmics.com/en/ for audio samples. Chinen continues his work on Audacity and FFMpeg, and presented his work at the Google Summer of Code 2010.

Travis Garrison ’06 is pursuing a PhD in Music Composition with a cognate in Historical Musicology from the University of Florida. His compositions were recently performed in France and across the United States at both conferences and festivals including ICMC, SEAMUS, and the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival.

Bruno Ruviaro ’04 is currently working as a doctoral scholar at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Recent compositions include a work for the Stanford Laptop Orchestra, and a trio that performed at the Darmstadt Festival in Germany.

Iroro Orife ’01 is working as a Senior Audio Engineer on Apple’s Final Cut Pro and is running his record label “de’fchild.” For more information, visit the label’s website at http://soundcloud.com/defchild.

Tae Hong Park ’00 recently received tenure at Tulane University, was elected President of ICMA, and is also an editor of SEAMUS.

Colby Leider ’98 was hired as the Director of the Music Engineering Program at the University of Miami. He is currently researching long-term acoustical/meteorological interactions in the Florida everglades.

Ko Umezaki ’93 works in the University of California Irvine’s Music Department in the Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology area. Umezaki produced Huun Huur Tu’s October release of  “Ancestors Call on World Village,” performs with the Silk Road Ensemble, works with the string quartet Brooklyn Rider, and composes with Joe Gramley. Most of his compositions feature Japanese shakuhachi flutes and mobile electronic devices.

Ray Guillette ’92 lives in Berkeley, CA, and is developing an interactive audio-biofeedback environment for the treatment of traumatic-stress conditions.

Alison Mattek

Alison Mattek

by Rebecca Fawcett

Photo: Alison Mattek, a current digital musics graduate student, works in the Bregman Music Audio Research Studio at Dartmouth.