Colloquium Series

The CCRMA Colloquium is a weekly gathering of CCRMA students, faculty, staff, and guests. It is an opportunity for members of the CCRMA community and invited speakers to share the work that they are doing in the field of Computer Music.  The colloquium typically happens every Wednesday during the school year from 5:15 - 7:00pm and meets in the CCRMA Classroom, Knoll 217 unless otherwise noted. 

Colloquia and concerts are announced via a mailing list.



 

Recent Colloquia

  • Jacob Kirkegaard: Labyrinthitis - the ear as instrument

    Date: 
    Wed, 04/03/2013 - 5:00pm - 7:00pm
    Location: 
    CCRMA Stage, The Knoll, 3rd floor
    Event Type: 
    Colloquium
    Labyrinthitis is based on a physical phenomenon: when two frequencies at a certain ratio are played into the ear, the ear itself will produce a third, deeper tone - a vivid hum, whistle or buzz. For Labyrinthitis, Kirkegaard starts off with two tones which induces a third tone in the listener's ear. He then reproduces that tone and adds a second frequency, triggering a new tone. The process is repeated, creating a descending canon that makes for a rich and utterly mesmerizing listening experience - all the more so as the listener can hear different tones in each ear. 


    bio:
    Open to the Public

  • Erik M. Schmidt: Modeling and Predicting Emotion in Music

    Date: 
    Wed, 03/20/2013 - 5:10pm - 7:00pm
    Event Type: 
    Colloquium
    This work seeks to relate core concepts from psychology to that of signal processing to understand how to extract information relevant to musical emotion from an acoustic signal. The methods discussed here survey existing features using psychology studies and develop new features using basis functions learned directly from magnitude spectra with deep belief networks. Furthermore, this work presents a wide breadth of approaches in developing functional mappings between acoustic data and emotion space parameters (e.g., conditional random fields). Using these models, a framework is constructed for content-based modeling and prediction of musical emotion.

    Full abstract:
    Open to the Public

  • Alain Renaud : Interactions over the network - tales from the past, present and the future

    Date: 
    Wed, 03/13/2013 - 5:15pm - 7:00pm
    Location: 
    CCRMA Classroom, The Knoll 2nd floor, Rm 217
    Event Type: 
    Colloquium
     This colloquium covers practice-based research in the field of network music performance (NMP) and networked interactions. The talk will provide an overview past experiences and the development of various frameworks for interacting over the network. It will bring a particular emphasis on two recent projects in this area.  More information on various projects: https://www.alainrenaud.net
     

    Open to the Public

  • Brian Crabtree : small is beautiful

    Date: 
    Wed, 03/06/2013 - 5:15pm - 7:00pm
    Location: 
    CCRMA Classroom, The Knoll 2nd floor, Rm 217
    Event Type: 
    Colloquium
     With monome in its sixth year, i'll trace our progression from art practice to small business, emphasizing minimalist design, transparency, and local, responsible production methods. Our philosophy on sharing information has both fostered an enthusiastic user community and inspired similar endeavors by like-minded designers.

    Open to the Public

  • Peter R Egbert: Real-time magnetic resonance imaging of the vocal tract during harmonica pitch bends

    Date: 
    Wed, 02/27/2013 - 5:15pm - 7:00pm
    Location: 
    CCRMA Classroom, The Knoll 2nd floor, Rm 217
    Event Type: 
    Colloquium

    Skilled harmonica players learn to bend the pitch of certain notes by a semitone or more, especially in blues playing, by adjusting the shape of their vocal tract.  The changes of the vocal tract have been partially viewed with endoscopy and ultrasound but are still incompletely understood. MRI studies have not been done previously.  I will present results of a recent Stanford MRI study of a professional harmonica player using nonmagnetic, MRI-compatible diatonic harmonicas playing draw and blow notes in both unbent and bent positions. Three-dimensional static and 2-dimensional real-time magnetic resonance images of the upper airway were recorded in the sagittal and coronal planes.

    Open to the Public

  • Pierre Divenyi : Fishing a Sound Pattern Out of the Mud - Some Experiments In Auditory Scene Analysis

    Date: 
    Wed, 02/20/2013 - 5:15pm - 7:00pm
    Location: 
    CCRMA Classroom, The Knoll 2nd floor, Rm 217
    Event Type: 
    Colloquium
     When the objective is to recognize a target pattern in a setting where other streams are concurrently present, the process can be challenging, especially when the target and the distractor streams share characteristics along one or more dimensions. In a series of experiments, we examined this phenomenon – failure of auditory scene analysis also called informational masking – in reduced settings.
    Open to the Public

  • Eric Humphrey : Deep Learning in Music Informatics - New Directions for the Next Decade

    Date: 
    Wed, 02/13/2013 - 5:15pm - 7:00pm
    Location: 
    CCRMA Classroom, The Knoll 2nd floor, Rm 217
    Event Type: 
    Colloquium

     As we look to the future of content-based music informatics, there is a general sense that progress is decelerating throughout the field. On closer inspection, performance trajectories across several applications reveal that this is more than just a feeling, raising some difficult questions for the discipline: why are we slowing down, and what can we do about it? This talk aims to address both of these issues.
    Open to the Public

  • Amit Zoran: Hybrid Fabrication and the Design of Musical Instruments

    Date: 
    Wed, 02/06/2013 - 5:15pm - 7:00pm
    Location: 
    CCRMA Classroom, The Knoll 2nd floor, Rm 217
    Event Type: 
    Colloquium
     

     In recent years, advances in digital tools have dramatically altered our ability to design the physical world. Musical instruments have always been at the cross-section of traditional and contemporary technologies, which makes them a great domain for design exploration.This research explores what has conventionally been treated as two divergent design realms - that of emerging digital technologies and timeless hand-hewn craft.

    Open to the Public

  • Data Visualization: Sha Hwang - The Silver Object for Us is the Same - Visualizing the Ephemeral

    Date: 
    Wed, 01/30/2013 - 5:15pm - 7:05pm
    Location: 
    CCRMA Classroom
    Event Type: 
    Colloquium
    Sha will how is work looking at cities, culture, and memory using largly web based Data Visualizaiton techniques.

    http://postarchitectural.com
    FREE
    Open to the Public

  • Marguerite Humeau and Julien Bloit: The Opera of Prehistoric Creatures

    Date: 
    Wed, 01/23/2013 - 5:15pm - 7:00pm
    Location: 
    CCRMA Classroom, The Knoll 2nd floor, Rm 217
    Event Type: 
    Colloquium
     'The Opera of Prehistoric Creatures' sets up the rebirth of cloned creatures, their wandering and their sound epic. They are seeking to evolve in our contemporary era.The designer aims at resuscitating the sound of prehistoric creatures by reconstructing their vocal tract from incomplete data.  3D models are derived from MRI  scans (woolly mammoths frozen in Siberia) as well as fossil data .
    Open to the Public