Matriculation / Day 1

I'm officially a Stanford student and CCRMAlite.  You can check out the details of my coursework over at http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~adam.  Today was my second day of classes, and some first impressions are due.


First off, the Knoll (CCRMA headquarters) is a mansion dating to the 1910's and was once designated as the president's residence.  It feels rather like a castle, complete with stone construction, vaulted ceilings, and a spiral staircase.  The top floor offers views of San Francisco Bay to the north and the Stanford Dish / western foothills to the south.  It seems like the perfect place to watch the sun rise with a cup of strong coffee after an all night coding jam.


All of my six courses take place in the one classroom, room 217.  To get there you go past the music tech museum, up the spiral stairs, through a computer lab, and through another computer lab.  The room is furnished with long shared desks with AC outlets for all, and a projector shines onto the bare white wall at the front.  The walls are still adorned with old lamps and long drapes, and when chairs become scarce students sit in the windowsills or on the old radiator.  The room, perhaps the whole building, is reminiscent of J.F. Sebastian/J.R. Isidore's crib.  In short, it's a geek haven.


Music 250a
HCI Theory and Practice (AKA Physical Interaction Design for Music) - Edgar Berdahl & Wendy Ju


HCI Theory and Practice is a funny name for this course, as it is really about hardware hacking and home-made alternative musical interfaces.  The students in this course have to buy a kit which contains an Arduino and some sensors.  The thrust of the course is essentially to get us to learn a thing or two about electronics, embedded software, and using the two to control real-time audio processes running on a computer.  More specifically, the project involves the integration of sensors, arduino, firmware, and Max/MSP or PD.  I'm glad it's not a formal survey of HCI topics as presented in Computer Science, because I worked a little bit with an Arduino at CalArts, and I've been meaning to get back into that.


The course is taught by Ed Berdahl and Wendy Ju.  I had met Ed back in November 2008 when Miriam Kolar introduced me around.  He's very articulate and clearly enthusiastic about HCI for music.  He and Wendy presented some videos to get the gears turning, which can be found at http://ccrma.stanford.edu/courses/250a/videos.html.

Music 256a

Music, Computing, and Design I:
Software Design and Implementation for Computer Music - Ge Wang

Just to put it out there, Ge Wang is a bit of a celebrity in the computer music world.  Before I got to CCRMA, many people talked with had heard of him, or at knew of his projects.  It's no surprise, since he is the founder of the successful iPhone app company Smule, and he authored the ChucK programming language for real-time audio noodling/performing.  No doubt, his celebrity status is earned from his charismatic personality and open enthusiasm about new ideas, ranging from deeply intellectual issues to silly novelties.  Clearly, there are many fascinating sides to this man, and I'm thrilled to have someone this respectable as a professor (he's also my MST program advisor).

As for the course content, the first day was a lot of hand-waving about some really hefty issues.  For example, he was trying to briefly mention the follow-up course, 256b - Mobile Music, but ended up on a lengthy tangent about how handheld devices combine intimacy, communication, and creativity in a way that can change the way 

people think about making music, the way Beethoven changed the way people think about music.  He also touched on software design principles like polymorphism, a term which, combined with the requisite C/C++ experience, had to have scared away some newbies (hopefully).