Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics
Upcoming Events
Concepts and Control: Understanding Creativity in 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, generative AI has achieved impressive results in music generation. Yet, the challenge remains: how can these models be meaningfully applied in real-world music creation, for both professional and amateur musicians? We argue that what’s missing is an interpretable generative architecture—one that captures music concepts and their relations, which can be so finely nuanced that they defy straightforward description. In this talk, I will explore various approaches to creating such an architecture, demonstrating how it enhances control and interaction in music generation.
FREE
Open to the Public
Juhan Nam, "My Journey Toward Musically Intelligent Machines"
Date:
Fri, 11/15/2024 - 3:30pm - 5:00pm
Location:
CCRMA Classroom [Knoll 217] (ZOOM Link Below)
Event Type:
Guest Lecture 
Creating intelligent machines that can listen to, play, and even making music has been a longstanding human ambition. Recent advancements in AI, especially through deep learning, have brought us closer to realizing this vision. In this talk, I will share my personal journey in developing musically intelligent machines, beginning with my PhD research on music representation learning during the early days of deep learning, and continuing with my collaborative work with students over the past decade at KAIST. Key topics will include bridging music audio with language, human-AI music ensemble performances, and neural audio processing.
Open to the Public
Tristan Peng's Piano Recital
Date:
Fri, 11/15/2024 - 7:30pm - 9:00pm
Location:
CCRMA Stage
Event Type:
Concert 
Recital Program
- Prokofiev Piano Sonata No. 3, Op. 28
- Bach Toccata in E Minor, BWV 914
- Chopin Nocturnes Op. 48
- Ravel Miroirs
FREE
Open to the Public
Koubeh
Date:
Sat, 11/16/2024 - 7:30pm - 9:00pm
Location:
CCRMA Stage
Event Type:
Concert 
Koubeh is a New York-based band that mixes Iranian melodies with a fusion of global beats and original riffs.
FREE
Open to the Public
Foreign/Domestic
Date:
Thu, 11/21/2024 - 7:30pm - 9:30pm
Location:
CCRMA Stage / CCRMA LIVE
Event Type:
Concert 
CCRMA presents a live performance by Foreign/Domestic.
FREE and Open to the Public | In Person + Livestream
Recent Events
Purnima Kamath on Generative Models for Sound Design
Date:
Fri, 09/13/2024 - 10:30am - 12:00pm
Location:
CCRMA Seminar Room
Event Type:
Hearing Seminar 
Large language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT are making striking changes to how we think about words and intelligence. Generative models (https://developers.google.com/machine-learning/gan/generative) take these ideas a step further by creating new data from a text prompt. Can an LLM and a generative model create new kinds of sounds? It is easy to imagine a system that lets you generate dog sounds, for example. But how would you build a system that lets you ask for a dog sound with a touch of wolf? With steerability or morphing the sound landscapes become much more interesting. Can we control a generative model to make both big and small changes to the sound we generate?
FREE
Open to the Public
Lobe Concert: Goodbye Sam & Nolan!
Date:
Sat, 08/31/2024 - 7:30pm - 9:00pm
Location:
CCRMA Stage / CCRMA LIVE
Event Type:
Concert 
Join Lobe for some groovy modern jazz originals (including the Beatles and Studio Ghibli... kind of?) as they say goodbye to Sam and Nolan!
Lobe is Ethan Buck, Sam Silverstein, Nolan Miranda, Daiki Nakajima, Michael Hayes, and Mark Rau in spirit
Tech: Sami Wurm
FREE and Open to the Public | In Person + Livestream
Lobe is Ethan Buck, Sam Silverstein, Nolan Miranda, Daiki Nakajima, Michael Hayes, and Mark Rau in spirit
Tech: Sami Wurm
FREE and Open to the Public | In Person + Livestream
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
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).
