I was a MA/MST student at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Accoustics.
This is my weblog.
Click here for my main page.
I've finished the first week of my internship at Yamaha. I'm not sure how much I can talk about the specifics of what I'm doing, so I will err on the side of not talking about it at all for now. But there is plenty of other stuff to talk about. I think I am the first intern from CCRMA to work here, which was a bit surprising to me initially given CCRMA's past connections with Yamaha. But then I found out that this internship program only started about three years ago. So it's not really that surprising after all. I do feel a responsibility to make sure things go well and help ensure future collaborations, but given how the first week has gone I think that won't be too difficult. The headquarters of the music division is in Hamamatsu city (浜松市), which is also the city that I'm living in. However, the research center I'm interning at is in Iwata (磐田市), the same city as Yamaha Motors' headquarters. I'm working in the Vocaloid group and people are pretty busy right now since they have announced an upcoming major release of the software. But everyone I've met here has been really nice. My manager especially has taken great pains to make sure that I've settled in well. Being able to understand some Japanese helps a lot. I was in Japan in 2004 for a different internship, and even though I had studied Japanese for two years prior to that I wasn't really able to carry on a normal conversation. It made things pretty difficult. While I'm still not fluent, I can usually find a way to communicate with people now and can read enough to get a general idea of what's going on. As far as music goes, I brought a tiny keyboard controller with me and am setting up my mini-studio environment so hopefully I will be able to crank out a couple of songs while I'm here. I don't think I'll have any studio access so it will probably be all-digital stuff, but I've been meaning to do more of that anyway. Pretty much everyone in the group here plays some sort of musical instrument (or does computer music) but it seems like it might be difficult to get jam sessions together. We'll see. On a different note, Yamaha Motors owns a professional soccer team, Jubilo, and one of Yamaha Music's managers, who I had met at CCRMA, took me to a game. Even though we lost 2-1 it was a lot of fun. In a bit of a contrast to American sporting events where music or officially organized cheering can only occur during breaks in the action, there were organized cheers for both teams during pretty much the entire game. Also, apparently yelling to the tune of Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer" is a common cheer? In future posts I will try to talk about things I find interesting during my stay here. And of course if I do some more work you can find out about it here. Thanks for reading!