Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics
Upcoming Events
Homage to Ligeti | CCRMA 50th Anniversary
Date:
Sun, 11/03/2024 - 7:30pm - 9:30pm
Event Type:
Concert 
A major concert will kick off the final series of events celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Join us in Dinkelspiel Auditorium on November 3 at 7:30pm for a program of music by György Ligeti, whose five-month residency at Stanford in 1972 and friendship with John Chowning helped lead to the founding of CCRMA. This all-Ligeti program comprises Atmosphères (featured in the Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey) performed by the Stanford Symphony Orchestra; Musica ricercata performed by pianist Roger Xia '24; the electronic composition Artikulation; and the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra featuring violinist Tanja Becker-Bender with the Stanford New Ensemble conducted by Paul Phillips.
FREE and Open to the Public | In Person + Livestream
The New Sound of New Music: Contemporary Composition and Modern Record Production Practices, two part lecture series with Murat Çolak
Date:
Thu, 10/31/2024 - 6:00pm - 8:00pm
Date:
Thu, 11/07/2024 - 2:00pm - 4:00pm
Location:
CCRMA classroom
Event Type:
Guest Lecture 
Murat Colak is a Turkish-American composer, mastering engineer, mixer, record producer, and educator based in New York City. He’s known for his work in contemporary classical and experimental music, with records on acclaimed labels like KAIROS, Edition Wandelweiser, NEOS, New Focus, Jazzland, Innova, Carrier, and Da Vinci Classics among others.
During his residency at Stanford University's CCRMA, Dr. Colak will present two public lectures. The first will introduce his creative journey, offering insights into his compositional approach and how it intersects with his approach to sound engineering, especially in crafting acoustics for contemporary concert music..
Free
Open to the Public
Nat Condit-Schultz on Tempo, Tactus, Rhythm, Flow: Computational Hip Hop Musicology in Theory and Practice
Date:
Fri, 11/15/2024 - 10:30am - 12:00pm
Location:
CCRMA Seminar Room
Event Type:
Hearing Seminar 
Computational musicology is not just for classical music. In this talk, I will review a variety of computational investigations of hip hop based on my dataset, the Musical Corpus of Flow (MCFlow). Using MCFlow, we can characterize the "norms" of rap flow and investigate how they have changed historically, including changes in tempo and the density of rhyme over time. I will also discuss the methodological challenges of computational musicology in general, and hip-hop/pop musicology specifically, and demonstrate tools and methods I have developed.
FREE
Open to the Public
Learning Interpretable Representations for Controllable Deep Music Generation
Date:
Fri, 11/15/2024 - 2:30pm - 3:30pm
Location:
CCRMA Classroom [Knoll 217] (ZOOM Link Below)
Event Type:
DSP Seminar 
Abstract: Recently, the focus on enhancing control over generative AI has grown significantly. In this talk, I will introduce several approaches to enhance controllability through interpretable model design. I will begin by discussing compositional style transfer and representation disentanglement in monophonic, polyphonic, and cross-modality scenarios. Next, I will present a whole-song generation approach that captures long-term music structure via a compositional hierarchy. Throughout the talk, I will showcase demos that illustrate applications of these models for possibilities of human-machine music co-creation.
FREE
Open to the Public
Recent Events
Demo of Personalized 3d Sound System
Date:
Fri, 08/16/2024 - 12:00pm - 6:00pm
Location:
DoubleTree Hotel, 275 South Airport Blvd, South San Francisco, California
Event Type:
Hearing Seminar 
FREE
Open to the Public
Leslie Famularo on Differentiating and Optimizing an Auditory Model
Date:
Fri, 08/09/2024 - 12:00am - 12:00pm
Location:
CCRMA Seminar Room
Event Type:
Hearing Seminar 
One of the shortcomings of current AI work is the inability to tie the results back to known physics. This is useful both to help explain the results, but also to constrain the optimal solution to known physical properties of the system. Neural networks are hard. They are big, often times the result is inscruttable. What can be done?
New software paradigms such as JAX and PyTorch allow one to specify arbitrary computations in a way that can be differentiated. And if we can differentiate a function we can optimize it. Hurray. How can we express an auditory model in a differentiable fashion?
New software paradigms such as JAX and PyTorch allow one to specify arbitrary computations in a way that can be differentiated. And if we can differentiate a function we can optimize it. Hurray. How can we express an auditory model in a differentiable fashion?
FREE
Open to the Public
4D Audio-Visual Learning: A Visual Perspective of Sound Propagation and Production
Date:
Thu, 08/01/2024 - 3:00pm - 4:00pm
Location:
CCRMA Classroom
Event Type:
Guest Lecture 
FREE
Open to the Public
Dynamical mechanisms of how an RNN keeps a beat, uncovered with a low-dimensional reduced model
Date:
Wed, 07/31/2024 - 3:00pm - 4:00pm
Location:
CCRMA Classroom
Event Type:
Guest Lecture 
FREE
Open to the Public
Past Live Streamed Events
Recent News
Jonathan Berger's "My Lai" In the News
All kinds of new buzz in being generated by our own Jonathan Berger's latest opera My Lai. Congratulations, Jonathan and the Kronos Quartet!
"In My Lai, a monodrama for tenor, string quartet, and Vietnamese instruments, composer Jonathan Berger had countless tragic elements at his disposal... In this immersive performance, we had the sense that, rather than defaulting to the story's obvious tragic details, Berger illuminate a single, more subtle element - the outraged bewilderment we often feel in the face of unimaginable horror."
"In My Lai, a monodrama for tenor, string quartet, and Vietnamese instruments, composer Jonathan Berger had countless tragic elements at his disposal... In this immersive performance, we had the sense that, rather than defaulting to the story's obvious tragic details, Berger illuminate a single, more subtle element - the outraged bewilderment we often feel in the face of unimaginable horror."
Issue 21 of the Csound Journal Released
Issue 21 (Fall 2015) of the Csound Journal has been released! The journal can be read online here:
http://csoundjournal.com/issue21/index.html
This issue of the Csound Journal features an article written by MST student Paul Batchelor, which can be found here:
http://csoundjournal.com/issue21/chuck_sound.html
http://csoundjournal.com/issue21/index.html
This issue of the Csound Journal features an article written by MST student Paul Batchelor, which can be found here:
http://csoundjournal.com/issue21/chuck_sound.html
John Chowning Interview on RWM
#212 John Chowning 25.08.2015 (35' 26'')
Sonifying the world: How life's data becomes music
When Chris Chafe translates data into music, listeners sway to the beat of seizing brains, economic swings and smog.
"Unlike sex or hunger, music doesn’t seem absolutely necessary to everyday survival – yet our musical self was forged deep in human history, in the crucible of evolution by the adaptive pressure of the natural world. That’s an insight that has inspired Chris Chafe, Director of Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (or CCRMA, stylishly pronounced karma).
"Unlike sex or hunger, music doesn’t seem absolutely necessary to everyday survival – yet our musical self was forged deep in human history, in the crucible of evolution by the adaptive pressure of the natural world. That’s an insight that has inspired Chris Chafe, Director of Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (or CCRMA, stylishly pronounced karma).
