Research Groups

To listeners educated in Western classical tradition one of the most striking features of gagaku music is its foremost emphasis on timbre. Unlike Western classical orchestral works, which use functional harmony and instrumental sound fusion gagaku music employs fixed harmony and non-fusion. This original sound results both from the acoustical properties of instruments comprising the ensemble, as well as from compositional techniques used to mix them together. This research focuses on orchestration in one of the three principal bodies of gagaku music: kangen. Its aim is to assist listeners who would like to understand better how to listen to gagaku music, and composers who would like to add new works to its repertoire.

The Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra (MoPhO) is a new repertoire-based ensemble using mobile phones (e.g., iPhones) as the primary musical instrument. Far beyond ring-tones, MoPhO's interactive musical works take advantage of the unique technological capabilities of today's hardware and software, transforming multi-touch screens, built-in accelerometers, built-in microphones, GPS, data networks, and computation into powerful and yet mobile chamber meta-instruments.

MoPhO was instantiated in 2007 at CCRMA, Stanford University, by faculty member and director Ge Wang, Deutsche Telekom senior research scientist (now Michigan faculty member) Georg Essl, and visiting CCRMA researcher Henri Penttinen, with CCRMA Artistic Coordinator Chryssie Nanou, 2007-2008 MA/MST students, and generous support from Nokia. MoPhO performed its first public concert in January 2008.

The Music, Computing, and Design (MCD) research group, led by faculty member Ge Wang, conducts research in computer music design, including in (but not exclusive to) the following areas:

• creative design of software systems for computer music (of all types and scales)
• programming languages and interactive environments (e.g., ChucK)
• the social, human aspects of musical expression and computing
• software interfaces / interaction paradigms for composition, performance, and education
• music information retrieval
• computer-mediated performance ensembles (e.g., laptop orchestras; SLOrk)
• mobile music / social music (e.g., mobile phone orchestras, MoPhO, also see Smule)
• aesthetics of designing with technology
• education at the intersection of engineering, art, and humanities

Computers are becoming smaller and advanced sensing technologies are becoming more accessible to musicians. These trends allow musicians to create novel interfaces that promote the development of new music performance, new musical practices, and new art forms in general. Besides studying the practical aspects of prototyping new interfaces, we also research theory for conceiving of new interfaces and classifying them.

The Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk) is a large-scale, computer-mediated ensemble that explores cutting-edge technology in combination with conventional musical contexts - while radically transforming both. Founded in 2008 by director Ge Wang and students, faculty, and staff at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), this unique ensemble comprises more than 20 laptops, human performers, controllers, and custom multi-channel speaker arrays designed to provide each computer meta-instrument with its own identity and presence. The orchestra fuses a powerful sea of sound with the immediacy of human music-making, capturing the irreplaceable energy of a live ensemble performance as well as its sonic intimacy and grandeur. At the same time, it leverages the computer's precision, possibilities for new sounds, and potential for fantastical automation to provide a boundary-less sonic canvas on which to experiment with, create, and perform music.

Offstage, the ensemble serves as a one-of-a-kind learning environment that explores music, computer science, composition, and live performance in a naturally interdisciplinary way. SLOrk uses the ChucK programming language as its primary software platform for sound synthesis/analysis, instrument design, performance, and education.