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

  • Robert Henke: finding the beauty within

    Date: 
    Wed, 05/08/2013 - 5:15pm - 6:30pm
    Location: 
     CCRMA Stage , The Knoll 3rd floor
    Event Type: 
    Colloquium
     CCRMA visiting artist Robert Henke provides detailed insights into the artistic and technical aspects of his recent audiovisual works. Using his latest installation Fragile Territories as an example, he will talk about ideas, happy incidents, processes, compromises, logistics and collaboration. Henke will discuss the role of technology for his art and his self defined state as artist-engineer. He will also provide an outlook on his future plans and elaborate on how they are influenced by his previous works. 


    http://www.monolake.de/
    Open to the Public

  • Vesa Norilo: Kronos -- A New Approach to Signal Processing

    Date: 
    Wed, 05/01/2013 - 5:15pm - 7:00pm
    Location: 
    CCRMA Classroom, The Knoll 2nd floor, Rm 217
    Event Type: 
    Colloquium
     Kronos is a special purpose programming language and a compiler suite for musical signal processing tasks. The core concepts of the language include a unified signal model, with automatic optimization for multirate systems, including audio and control signals as well as events such as OSC or MIDI. Further, functional programming techniques are supported, such as generic programming with an expressive type system and pattern matching polymorphism. User programs are compiled just-in-time, and executed natively on the host CPU with minimal overhead.
    Open to the Public

  • Alex Brandmeyer: Auditory perceptual learning using decoded-EEG neurofeedback

    Date: 
    Wed, 04/24/2013 - 5:15pm - 7:00pm
    Location: 
    CCRMA Classroom, The Knoll 2nd floor, Rm 217
    Event Type: 
    Colloquium
    Auditory perceptual learning is a process in which skills of auditory perception improve through both passive and active exposure to sounds in the environment, and which underlies our abilities to perceive language and music. Individual differences in these perceptual skills can be observed in both our behaviors and in our brains’ automatic responses to sounds (i.e. auditory evoked responses). The results of these experiments suggest that,depending on stimulus features and participant instructions, the presentation of such feedback can lead to the modulation of distinct components of the auditory event-related potential.
    Open to the Public

  • Joshua Fineberg: Fictional Voices: the epi-phenomenology of illusory sounds

    Date: 
    Wed, 04/17/2013 - 5:15pm - 7:00pm
    Location: 
    CCRMA Classroom, The Knoll 2nd floor, Rm 217
    Event Type: 
    Colloquium

    Fictional Voices: the epi-phenomenology of illusory sounds

    FREE
    Open to the Public

  • Andrew Nelson : The origins and impact of CCRMA

    Date: 
    Wed, 04/10/2013 - 5:15pm - 7:00pm
    Location: 
    CCRMA Classroom, The Knoll 2nd floor, Rm 217
    Event Type: 
    Colloquium
     Today, CCRMA enjoys a literal and figurative embeddedness within Stanford and a reputation as one of the world's premiere computer music research groups. Alas, this was not always the case. This colloquium will present a historic "tour" of CCRMA, tracing its "pre-history" in the music and AI activities at Stanford and Bell Labs, through the financial and personnel crises that challenged its first decade, to the enormous influence that it's had on people and organizations around the world.

    Open to the Public

  • 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

Upcoming Colloquia

  • François Germain: Towards practical source-independent algorithms using nonnegative matrix factorization

    Date: 
    Wed, 04/23/2014 - 5:15pm - 7:00pm
    Location: 
    CCRMA Classroom, The Knoll 2nd floor, Rm 217
    Event Type: 
    Colloquium
    Limitations of nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) were recently circumvented through the development of "universal source models" which exploit the similarities inside a given class of sources in order to eliminate the need for user-provided training data. The resulting system is unsupervised from the user perspective which strongly improves its range of practical use. This method was applied to applications such as offline speech enhancement, voice activity detection and singing voice separation. 

    Full abstract:
    Open to the Public