Matt Wright's home page at CCRMA

I received my PhD from CCRMA's "Computer-Based Music Theory and Acoustics" program (via Stanford University's Music Department) in March 2008..

My dissertation is available online. My dissertation research involved Perceptual Attack Time, the time that a sound is perceived as a rhythmic event, which in general is not the same as the sound's onset. My research has three related projects:

• Measuring perceptual attack time with a downloadable listening experiment.
• Modeling perceptual attack time of arbitrary musical sounds directly from the raw signal.
• Representing perceptual attack time as a statistical probability density function for applications in music analysis and composition

Past Work at CCRMA

Sorry this is missing a lot from 2005-2007.

Here's what I did in Fall 2005

• TA for Music 250A "Human/Computer Interaction"
• Took some classes:
  • CS 376
  • CS 377
  • CASA 171

Here's what I did in Spring 2004:

• A big project for Music 220C ("Research Seminar in Computer-Generated Music")
• Reading, Homeworks for Music 421 ("Computational acoustic modeling for digital audio effects and sound synthesis"). (Schedule)
• Homeworks and Lab Assignments for Music 424 ("Signal Processing Techniques for Digital Audio Effects")
• Music 301C (Post-Tonal (Western Classical Tradition Art) Music Analysis)

Here's what I did in Winter 2004:

• I wrote a Studio Report about CCRMA for the 2004 International Computer Music Conference covering CCRMA's people, facilities, and activities (research, musical, and educational) with emphasis on recent changes and on CCRMA s contributions to the computer music community at large.
• I spoke and played Oud, Cümbüs baglama (saz), Greek Bouzouki, and custom laptop instruments Mark Applebaum's Stanford Improvisation Collective ("[sic]"). The computers were for the piece "5/4" by subquintet "The Kimberly Clark 5". Laptop 1 ran my old "catch+throw" live sampling Max/MSP patch controlled by Wacom tablet, Peavey 1600 MIDI fader box, and MidiWizard footpedal board via a Rimas Box. Laptops 2+3 ran my new QWERTY-keyboard-triggered sample-playback patch with banks of vocal samples. Laptop 4 ran Michael Gurevich's live feedback delay line patch.
• Music 220B (Synthesis Techniques, Compositional Algorithms, Psychoacoustics and Spatial Processing) in the CLM and related environments. Highlights:
  • A step-by-step tutorial for first-time Lisp programmers explaining an example using cellular automata
  • Another tutorial on Understanding arguments in Common Lisp
  • Some examples using cellular automata to control FM synthesis
  • Some experiments using cellular automata to generate families of amplitude envelopes
  • A plunderphonic mangling of a public service announcement by a famous soul singer and a tutorial on how I did it aimed at inciting future generations to do similar things.
  • A silly use of Perry Cook's physical model of the vocal tract to do a (synthetic) vocal percussion version of Samba
• Music 250B (HCI Performance Systems: Music Controller Design and Development). My final project was about latency testing.
• Reading and homeworks for Music 420 (Applications of the Fast Fourier Transform). My final project was an additive synthesizer for SDIF sinusoidal track models written in matlab.
• Music 301B (Tonal (European Music) Analysis). My final paper was an analysis of the Allegretto first movement Béla Bartók's Suite for piano, Opus 14

Here's what I did in Autumn 2003:

• Homeworks and Listening for Music 220A (CGen Sound). Highlights:
  • Musique Concrete etude for Oud and Tape
  • "Music of the Spheres" Pd patch
• Lab activities and Homeworks for Music 250a (HCI). My final project (with Grace Leslie and AJ Giardullo) was a "Live Performance Spatializer" consisting of a 3D accelerometer mounted on the end of a flute controlled the panning of the amplified flute via VBAP in Pd. See our final project writeup and the video of our final project.
• Reading and homeworks for Music 320 (DSP). My final project was designing filters to extract different kinds of gestural data from the signals from the accelerometers in the "Live Performance Spatializer".
• Readings, Analysis, Writing, and a Final Paper comparing two settings of the text "Quam Pulchra Es..." from the Song of Songs by 16th-century composers Gombert and Palestrina for Music 301a (Modal (Period of European Music) Analysis)
• Musicology Readings, Musicology Writings, and Bibliographical Assignments for Music 200 (ProSem). Highlights:
  • A bibliography of research involving Open Sound Control that was not mentioned in my otherwise comprehensive paper OpenSound Control: State of the Art 2003.
  • A Critical Review of the chapter "The Genealogy of Modern European Art Music" from Karol Berger's A Theory of Art in which I attempt to summarize his main points and arguments, and in which I take issue with his insistence on written notation as a requirement of artistic music and his confused dismissal of "real time" (i.e., improvised) and popular music.
  • An English-language user's guide to the Schubert Thematic Catalog.

Other stuff

I continue to work at the UC Berkeley Center for New Music and Audio Technology and my CNMAT home page has lots of information about me including my Annotated Bibliography of Publications.

In my copious spare time I love playing Afghan, Andaluse, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bedoin, Brazilian, Egyptian, Greek, Indian, Iraqi, Lebanese, Moroccan, Persian (Iranian), Turkish, and related musics.