I was a MA/MST student at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Accoustics.
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It's Martin Luther King day so we don't have classes. I'm taking the
time to do some work. It was a bit of an adjustment getting back into
things after my long break, but I'm slowly remembering how to be a
student again.
Since I've had a full week of classes, here are my initial
impressions:
150 - As I said before, it's nice to review basic physics every so
often. The acoustic concepts look like fun and I've heard from
one of the MA/MSTs that took the course last year that Tom
Rossing will bring in some great people to talk with us. Tom
also likes to play some pretty fantastic VHS tapes from decades
ago (including one produced at my alma mater) which keeps
things entertaining. The course has a lot of homework
assignments but everything seems like it will be kept at a
pretty introductory level. Hopefully I'll get some time to
talk with Tom outside of class; he's done a lot of work in a
wide variety of contexts.
421a - Julius is maintaining Julius pace in this course but I feel
like I'm keeping up. Of course, it's only been one week.
Having some time to digest the material from 420 and the other
DSP courses I took last year has helped. Spectral audio
techniques are of particular interest to me given the context
of my internship last summer.
422 - I'm not really sure how to feel about this course yet. It's
going to involve a good mix of programming and theory. In some
sense I feel well-prepared since I'm comfortable with bit-level
operations and Python and doing signal processing. On the
other hand I'm a bit rusty in all of those and hopefully we're
going to go outside the context of what I know. I think in the
back of my head I have been thinking that making audio codecs
sounds boring, but now that I'm looking into it I can see a lot
of places where it can be fun, or beautiful. I'm glad I'm
taking this course.
Overall I think it should be a good term. With only three courses I
should have enough time to really get into the material in each and
mull it over until I'm satisfied. Of course, I have many other
projects in the works if I find myself with nothing to do. Never
bored at CCRMA!