Center For Computer Research In Music And Acoustics Research Articles

A Study on the Direction of Applied Music Education in the Trend of 21 st Century Digital Music Contents

1988년 서울예술대학에 실용음악과 개설 이래 현재까지 지속적으로 증가하여 실용음악 관련 학과가 전국적으로 76개 학교에 개설되었다. 이러한 증가의 이유는 K-Pop의 글로벌한 성공과도 연계하여 생각해 볼 수 있는데, K-Pop은 성장기 청소년들에게 심리적 안녕감을 주며, 더불어 음악적 재능을 갖고 있는 청소년들로 하여금 대중음악 예술가에 대한 우상화 효과와 동경심을 갖도록 하기 때문이다. 매년 국내 실용음악 관련 학과에서 배출되는 예비 대중음악 인력 공급은 시간이 지날수록 팽창하고 있다. 실용음악 교육은 음악 이론 및 실습과 더불어 미디어 콘텐츠 자체를 직접 생산할 수 있는 기술 교육도 포함하고 있기 때문에 전공자들에게 예술가 양성 측면과 콘텐츠 생각 측면 모두 접근 가능한 환경으로 구성되어 있다. 이는 예술가를 비롯한 사업가 혹은 연계 분야로의 진출 가능성을 내포하고 있다. 그러나 현재의 국재 실용음악 교육은 다양한 가능성의 잠재력을 갖고 있음에도 불구하고 콘텐츠 산업에서 필요한 디지털 기술 트렌드 추이와 산업 현장에서 필요한 역량 교육에서 있어서 다각화와 융합적 훈련은 미진해 보인다. 1980년대 MIDI의 출현은 대중음악 제작 시스템과 음악 산업의 큰 변화를 가져왔으며, 개인이 혼자서도 충분히 음악을 제작할 수 있는 시스템이 가능하도록 하였다. 21세기로 진입하면서, 음악시장은 디지털 시대로 완전히 정착을 하였고, 디지털 오디오 형식은 음악 공유의 새로운 시장 패러다임을 만들었다. IT 기술의 진보는 멀티미디어 콘텐츠 시장 활성화를 더욱 부추겼으며, 기술의 발전은 오디오 포맷과 녹음 기술에도 영향을 미치게 된다. 소비자들은 기존의 2채널 스테레오에서 5.1채널, 7.1채널, 바이노럴 녹음 등의 서라운드 음향 경험을 하게 되었고, 이는 음악 콘텐츠 제작의 방법 변화를 가져오게 된다. 기술의 진보에 따라 예술과 과학의 융합 교육이 필요하며, 정통적인 음악 교육을 통한 예술가 배출뿐만 아니라, 연계학문으로의 진출과 사업가 정신이 함양할 필요가 있다. 국내 대학에서 이런 융합 연구를 하는 사례들을 찾아볼 수 있는데, 국내의 일부 대학에서는 음악 교육 이외에 창의, 문제해결, 창업, 글로벌 역량 등의 과정을 포함하는 경우를 발견할 수 있었으며, 해외 대학에서는 미국의 CCRMA, 프랑스의 IRCAM 등의 사례에서 매우 적극적인 예술과 과학 융합 연구가 진행되고 있음을 확인하였다. 매년 수천 명에 이르는 실용음악 계열 전공 졸업자들은 이미 한국 사회에서 과포화 상태에 이르렀으며, 관련 직업은 제한되어 있기 때문에 경제활동을 위한 사회진출이 쉽지 않다. 정통 음악 교육 방식을 벗어나 음악 창의적 능력을 융합한 사업가 그리고 과학자를 배출할 수 있는 다각적 사고의 폭을 넓히도록 도움을 줄 수 있는 실용음악 교육 패러다임의 전환이 필요하다.Since the Department of Applied Music at Seoul Institute of the Arts opened in 1988, 76 applied music schools has been opened, nationwide. The reason may be connected to K-Pop’s global success, which promotes the psychological well-being of the youth, and the idolization of pop artists. This is because it has an effect and a longing. Preliminary human resources produced by domestic applied music-related departments for the pop music industry is growing every year. In addition to music theory and practice, applied music education includes technical education to produce media contents directly. This implies the possibility of entry as artists, entrepreneurs, etc. Although the current Korean applied music education has the potential to explore various possibilities, diversification and convergence training seem to be insufficient with respect to the requirements of digital technology in the contents industry and competency education in the industrial field. The emergence of Musical Instrument Digital Interface(MIDI) in the 1980s brought a major change in the popular music production system and the music industry, enabling individuals to produce music themselves. As we entered the 21st century, the music market settled completely into the digital age, and digital audio formats created a new market paradigm for music sharing. Advancements in Information Technology have further fueled the growth of multimedia contents market. They are affecting audio formats and recording technologies. Additionally, consumers have already experienced a surround sound effect of 5.1ch, 7.1ch, binaural recordings, etc., on existing 2ch stereos, which is changing the way music contents are being produced. Technological advancements call for art and science convergence education. Artists not only require the usual music education, but they also need skills to advance into connected studies and cultivate their business spirit. Examples of such convergence research are found at domestic universities. Some universities in Korea include music, education, problem solving, entrepreneurship, and global competency. With respect to overseas educational institutions such as Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics(CCRMA) in the USA and Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music(IRCAM) in France, it is found that research on art and science convergence is already in progress. Korea produces thousands of applied music graduates each year, resulting in oversaturation of the market. Hence, their careers are limited and so are their opportunities to get involved in economic activities. Applied music education will experience a shift in the paradigm that can help in expanding the multifaceted thinking required to produce entrepreneurs and scientists who have creative converged music skills beyond knowledge acquired from typical music education methods.

Searching for the GRAIL

This article describes a quest for the GRAIL (Giant Radial Array for Immersive Listening), a large-scale loudspeaker system with related hardware and software control equipment. The GRAIL was developed at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University, evolving from the need for optimal sound quality in our multichannel concerts. It is also used for teaching and research. The current GRAIL is one step in an ongoing evolutionary process, characterized by the use of off-the-shelf hardware components and custom software–based on free software languages and libraries. While developing our software, we have, as much as possible, aimed to take advantage of existing programs and utilities.

Recent extensions to topological and nonlinear aspects of wave digital filter theory

The Wave Digital Filter approach can be used to create computational models of lumped reference systems, including rectilinear mechanical, rotational mechanical, acoustical, and electronic systems. When they are applicable, Wave Digital Filters enjoy properties including modularity, accuracy, and guaranteed incremental passivity that make them attractive in the context of musical instrument and audio effect simulation. However, the class of reference systems that can be modeled with Wave Digital Filters has historically been restricted to systems with simple topologies (which can be decomposed entirely into series and parallel connections) and which contain only a single “nonadaptable” element (e.g., a diode, ideal source, or switch). This talk details recent Wave Digital Filter advances from Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), which broaden the applicability of Wave Digital Filters to reference systems with any topology and an arbitrary number of nonlinearit...

The Sound of Innovation: Stanford and the Computer Music Revolution by Andrew J. Nelson

Reviewed by: The Sound of Innovation: Stanford and the Computer Music Revolution by Andrew J. Nelson Simon Zagorski-Thomas (bio) The Sound of Innovation: Stanford and the Computer Music Revolution. By Andrew J. Nelson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. Pp. 248. $34. The Sound of Innovation provides a fascinating journey through the history of Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). Andrew Nelson has indeed drawn on “extensive archival research and dozens of interviews with digital music pioneers” (inside front cover notes) to bring this story together. One of the first keyboards I bought when I started a commercial studio in the mid-1980s was a Yamaha DX7, the hugely influential and profitable result of the partnership between Yamaha and John Chowning’s CCRMA. My first degree was a joint honors that included Artificial Intelligence and, after I’d moved away from programming toward being a “consumer” of commercial music computing, the DX7, with Chowning’s FM synthesis, was one of the few things that drew me into the more theoretical world of shaping sounds using digital processors. So, not only did I want to read this book, I also found myself drawn into the narrative and wanting it to be an epic saga of heroism. The first five chapters certainly drew me in and allowed, even encouraged, me to construct that sort of story. The remainder of the book brought me back to earth and reminded me that life is more complicated. That may not make it a very good epic saga but it does make a better history book. The CCRMA certainly deserves the sobriquet “hotbed,” and Nelson [End Page 1039] has done a great job of gathering together the evidence about what happened. I’m less convinced about the explanatory theory and, therefore, how well it fits with the MIT Inside Technology series aim to “stimulate a variety of perspectives that address the social shaping of technology.” It is not that the explanatory power of multivocality to show “how interdisciplinarity, open innovation and commercialization not only can reinforce one another, but also can form an inseparable web of mutual fate” (p. 9) is problematic. It is just that I felt there was a suggestion of agency around the CCRMA throughout the book that made that explanation more two-dimensional. So what do I mean by “a suggestion of agency”? Nelson describes multivocality as a “tactical capacity” (p. 161), a tool used by a successful agent, rather than as a generalized attribute of a system. There may be many instances of the CCRMA deliberately sustaining “multiple attributions to its activities” (p. 161) in ways that worked to its advantage. However, I wasn’t convinced that, for example, the involvement of the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, and the California Arts Council should be uncritically attributed to the “CCRMA’s skill at multivocality” (p. 162) rather than to more general attributes of the system (probably including that skill). I also felt the definition of success and progression could have been explored in more nuanced terms. The tangled web of commercial protectionism and open access can be read as an optimal combination of financial security and academic freedom in retrospect, but this doesn’t amount to the “secret formula” that Dane Stangler’s back cover quote suggests. I wonder if it amounts to much more than saying that if you want to be generous it’s a good idea to get rich first. Perhaps it’s my dour British sensibility but the narrative of superlatives grated on me. On the one hand, that may be an unpleasant by-product of me growing up without central heating in a drizzle-based climate, but it also comes from a wariness of history written by the winners. If the United Kingdom can have written its own history to the extent that the rest of the world doesn’t unanimously think of “the Empire” as a period of ruthless thievery and bloody genocide, then what are all the other victorious authors of their own history getting away with? What I should emphasize though, before I’m accused of setting up a straw man, is that I...

Life and Times of the Samson Box

Peter Samson designed and built a real-time signal-processing computer for music applications in the 1970s. The Systems Concepts Digital Synthesizer (“Samson Box” for short) was installed at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University in 1977, where it served for over a decade as the principal music generation system. It was an important landmark in the transition from general-purpose computers to real-time systems for music and audio, and helped set the stage for the sea change in the music industry from analog to digital technologies that began in the 1980s and continues at a rapid pace today. This article focuses on the historical context of the Samson Box, its development, its impact on the culture of CCRMA and the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, its use for music research and composition at Stanford, and its role in the transformation of the music and audio industries from analog to digital practices. A list of compositions realized on the Samson Box is included, which shows that from 1978 to its decommissioning in 1992 it was used to create over 100 finished works, many of which were widely performed and were awarded prizes. A companion article provides a detailed architectural review and an interview with Pete Samson.

Putting university research in context: Assessing alternative measures of production and diffusion at Stanford

Scholars widely acknowledge that university research is critical to innovation and entrepreneurship. Much of the literature on university research, however, evokes a linear model from “science to products” and focuses, therefore, upon a limited set of indicators such as patents and licenses. Such a perspective runs the danger of missing the myriad ways in which science and commerce are intertwined and the myriad ways in which these activities might be assessed. In this paper, I address the question of how different measures reflect different perspectives and biases by investigating the production and diffusion of research associated with one of Stanford University's most prolific interdisciplinary centers, the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). I draw upon a unique data set that captures activities and engagement surrounding CCRMA for its 30-year history through a wide variety of measures, ranging from publication citations to industrial affiliates to personnel mobility. Employing the analytic categories of “description” and “enactment,” and distinguishing between “indicators” and “pathways,” I show how different measures reflect different activities and learning processes, and how they dramatically alter perceptions of active individuals, organizational reach, and timing and sequencing of activities. Building on these findings, I present a more complete model of university research production and diffusion, I discuss how alternative measures challenge certain assumptions in the literature, and I suggest concrete policy initiatives to improve our measurement and assessment of university research.

Image, Engagement, Technological Resource: An Interview with Roger Reynolds

Roger Reynolds (see Figure 1) has been a major figure investigating the confluence of music and technology since the 1960s. As resources have evolved, his works have explored live analog electronics, fixed analog and digital media, and live processing of acoustic sound-all unified and directed by a distinct compositional voice that balances intuition with formalized thought (see Table 1). Having studied music and engineering at the University of Michigan, Mr. Reynolds was a co-founder of the ONCE group. Later, after seven years of organizing and performing in new music concerts in Germany, France, and Japan, he joined the young music department at the University of California, San Diego, in 1969. Once there, he founded the Center for Music Experiment and has remained a vital force on its faculty for the last 37 years. His work with new technology has led to notable residencies including those at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), Stockholm's Elektroakustisk Musik i Sverige (EMS), and Les Ateliers UPIC in Paris; grants and commissions from most major awarding agencies; and frequent performances at major festivals around the world. Recently, his ILLUSION for actors, singers, instrumental soloists, chamber ensemble, and eightchannel computer-processed sound was premiered by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group. He is currently working on Sanctuary, an evening-long percussion quartet with computer processing and staging. The present interview is drawn from a larger discussion that included aspects of Mr. Reynolds's work with multimedia. Here, we focus primarily on his conceptual and methodological approaches to music and technology and the exploration of recent compositional projects. We met twice at his home in Del Mar, California, in April and October 2005 and subsequently revised the materials via electronic mail.

IDEAMA – The International Digital Electroacoustic Music Archive

IDEAMA – The International Digital Electroacoustic Music Archive was founded by the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), Stanford University, and the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe in 1990. IDEAMA was conceived as an “all-digital” archive preserving electroacoustic music composed up to about 1970. The target collection of 569 compositions was completed in 1996 and is currently accessible at 23 institutions worldwide. Since then, ZKM has been responsible for the collection. The main issues during the process of establishing the collection were the criteria for the selection of the pieces to be archived, the question of acoustical restoration, the solutions for storage and access, the legal issues – and, last but not least, “money.”

Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) Summer Concert

Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) Summer Concert

The Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) Winter Concert

The Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) Winter Concert

Machine Tongues XVII: CLM: Music V Meets Common Lisp

As the 1980s wore to an end, the wonderful PDP-10 and Samson box (Samson 1985) at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) began to seem fatally old-fashioned. MIDI was everyone's new darling; tape music was dead. Worse, the old 1960s vintage hardware began to fall apart, and the repairs rivaled the designs of Rube Goldberg. When CCRMA decided to buy NeXT computers, it became painfully obvious how much we were losing-hundreds of thousands of lines of unportable Sail, Fail, and FORTRAN code, hundreds of years of effort, and the best FM synthesizer anywhere, all tossed into the trash heap. I had spent more than ten years building a little computer nest (Schottstaedt 1983) and, in the course of writing more than 20 pieces, had become very much at home there. The move to the NeXT set me back ten years with no straightforward way to recover my favorite instruments or composing tools. I had three choices: the NeXT MusicKit (Jaffe 1989), Csound (Vercoe 1991), or start all over from the beginnning. The NeXT MusicKit was similar to the Samson box system we had just left, and CSound was essentially the same as the old Mus10 world, an outgrowth of Music V (Mathews 1969; Pope 1993) that the Samson box software had replaced. Both of these choices were familiar, and both were in use by real composers, so I started out on the assumption that one or the other would become my new home. I tackled the MusicKit first. It provides a sophisticated entry into the NeXT sound-support hardware, including highly optimized access to the NeXT's built-in Motorola DSP56000, a 24-bit microprocessor aimed at common digital signal-processing tasks. Unfortunately, one DSP56000 is not a Samson box. It can just barely synthesize two FM violins (Schottstaedt 1977) in real time, but I was used to using as many as 50. To continue writing the kind of music I like to write, I would have to split up the note lists into 56000-size pieces, then do lots of overlays. In addition, the MusicKit's real-time orientation leads to complicated envelope and instrument definitions and makes it difficult to get at individual samples. Despite my admiration for the job David Jaffe and Julius Smith have done, the more I looked into the MusicKit, the less I seemed to be getting from it. On the other hand, Csound, which several of my friends use and regard very highly, did not run at that time on the NeXT, and my attempt to port it failed. So, I sat down to write yet another version of Music V.

Foundations of Computer Music

This survey chronicles the major advances in computer music that have changed the way music is composed, performed, and recorded. It contains many of the classic, seminal articles in the field (most of which are now out of print) in revised and updated versions. Computer music pioneers, digital audio specialists, and highly knowledgeable practitioners have contributed to the book. Thirty-six articles written in the 1970s and 1980s cover sound synthesis techniques, synthesizer hardware and engineering, software systems for music, and perception and digital signal processing. The editors have provided extensive summaries for each section.Curtis Roads is editor of Computer Music Journal. John Strawn is a Research Associate at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University.

Digital Synthesis of Plucked-String and Drum Timbres

There are many techniques currently used for digital music synthesis, including frequency modulation (FM) synthesis, waveshaping, additive synthesis, and subtractive synthesis. To achieve rich, natural sounds, all of them require fast arithmetic capability, such as is found on expensive computers or digital synthesizers. For musicians and experimenters without access to these machines, musically interesting digital synthesis has been almost impossible. The techniques described in this paper can be implemented quite cheaply on almost any computer. Real-time synthesis implementations have been done for Intel 8080A (by Alex Strong), Texas Instruments TMS9900 (by Kevin Karplus), and SC/MP (by Mike Plass) microprocessors. David Jaffe and Julius Smith have programmed the Systems Concept Digital Synthesizer at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) to perform several variants of the algorithms (Jaffe and Smith 1983). Not only are the algorithms simple to implement in software, but hardware realizations are easily done. The authors have designed and tested a custom n-channel metal-oxide semiconductor (nMOS) chip (the Digitar chip), which computes 16 independent notes, each with a sampling rate of 20 KHz.

Notes on the Implementation of MUSBOX: A Compiler for the Systems Concepts Digital Synthesizer

In 1978 the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University acquired a remarkable musical instrument: the prototype of the Systems Concepts Digital Synthesizer (SCS) designed and built by Peter Samson of Systems Concepts, San Francisco, to the specifications of CCRMA. The principal purpose of the synthesizer design was to address the high computational bandwidth required for real-time high-quality digital audio signal processing. It is well known that digital synthesis techniques have been limited by the sheer speed, precision, and consequent volume of computation required for useful and interesting results. It was hoped that a special-purpose digital computer that directly addressed the nature of the data to be manipulated would be sufficiently fast to do useful amounts of signal computation in real time. The resulting design is described elsewhere in the literature (Loy 1980; Samson 1980; Samson forthcoming), but a brief review is not out of place here. The synthesizer uses standard TTL logic, relying extensively on time-division multiplexing and pipelining techniques to implement a fixed set of processing capabilities. The synthesizer is divided into modules, called processing elements, which can be configured to perform specific signal processing functions. There are four classes of processing elements, each class being uniquely suited to one kind of processing (Fig. 1). They are generators, which produce a variety of periodic fixedwaveform signals; modifiers, which modify signals; sum memory, which provides a means of intercommunication between the individual generators and modifiers; and delay units, which interface the modifiers to a large memory bank (up to 64K 20-bit words) for reverberation and table storage. There are 256 generators, 128 modifiers, 256 sum memory locations, and 32 delay units; not all sum memory locations can be written by all processing elements, however. All of these processing elements can run simultaneously. Each generator is divided functionally into an oscillator part and an envelope part. The oscillator part produces normalized square, sawtooth, pulse train, sin(x), sin(x+FM), and sum-of-cosines waveforms. The oscillator parameters that can be controlled include frequency (28 bits), frequency sweep (20), phase angle (20), number of cosines to be summed (if any), and a sum memory address from which frequency modulation (FM) data are taken. The envelope part can produce a constant (12), plus either a linear ramp (24) or a positive or negative exponential function to control the amplitude of the oscillator, with an overall precision of 20 bits. A final 12-by-13-bit two-quadrant multiply scales the oscillator product by the amplitude product, and the result is written to a specified 20-bit-wide sum memory location. In addition, the generators have degenerate modes in which they perform other nec? 1981 by D. Gareth Loy