I was a MA/MST student at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Accoustics.
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I made it through the first week. I don't formally have any courses on Fridays, but I will attend whatever seminars I can. I understand 220a a bit better now. Yesterday we split into an acoustic group and a laptop group. I was in the acoustic group with my trusty flute. We developed various musical gestures, assigned them names, and thought about them in terms of how we would program a computer to perform them. One thing Chris Chafe mentioned that resonated with me is that dynamics are difficult to distinguish (ie, is there really a difference between pp and ppp and pppp, or ff and fff and ffff). When I've been working with MIDI and tracked modules there are usually 64-128 velocity or volume subdivisions. I usually only use about 3-6 values unless I'm interpolating for a crescendo or decrescendo. For a human instrumentalist, each note when playing at a specific dynamic can have a subtly different volume to add character to the sound. But it's tedious to try to do that by hand on a computer. I bet I can develop an algorithm to do it for me, so I can just specify a dynamic like mp and have it modulate the velocity automatically. This is something I've been wanting to hack out for a little while, and I think I'll get a chance to do it while I'm here. The laptop group came to listen to our session, and then we went to listen to them perform "a breeze brings..." We will swap groups partway through the quarter.