I was a MA/MST student at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Accoustics.
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The first project I worked on at Yamaha has finally been announced: http://www.vocaloid.com/us/ It's a VOCALOID Singer Library called CYBER DIVA. I wrote a pretty detailed account of its development (the non-confidential part at least) on the above site so I'll let you read it if you're interested. I also gave possibly the worst talk of my life about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-q8a_xbs-xs Guess I should have finished up Toastmasters all those years ago after all. I will say this though: not being able to talk about what you're working on for two years shows a big difference between academia and industry. Both have their merits. I'm happy that my work will reach many people through Yamaha, and getting paid is also nice. But on the other hand I liked the openness of CCRMA. It's possible to do public or collaborative research in a company, just like it's possible to make money and reach many people as an academic, but the environment you're in definitely biases what you will do. It's worth thinking about. I got to go to NAMM to help support the product announcement. It was my first NAMM, and it was really, really cool. Of course the Yamaha area was fun; they had a bunch of awesome old keyboards including a GS-1, VP-1 (!!!) (couldn't play it though) and Stevie Wonder's CS-80. I got to play the trans-acoustic piano. There was just a ton of cool stuff. CYBER DIVA was there too, at the Steinberg booth! I got to play a Prophet 12 at the Dave Smith Instruments booth, which had a patch called "It's a Prophet!" and all I could think of when I was done playing was "Yes, yes it is" and "Now I want one." And the Radikal Technologies Accelerator impressed me with its clean, enormous sound. It's like what I want the Wilsynth to be. Very inspiring. The Line6 Firehawk demo showed off the benefits of modeling. And I ran into Julius and Romain and Pat and Nick, which was unexpected and great. Pat introduced me to Jordan Rudess but he was really busy. The moForte apps look pretty cool; again, gotta love physical modeling. And now that I'm back in Japan and jetlagged I need to buckle down and finish my Tokyo Demo Fest 2015 entry. I hope the streaming music compo rules are the same this year. I'm about 60% done so I have my work cut out for me. I know what I want to do but after work I'm usually too tired to do much sequencing. Time to get the keyboard out of the closet and just play; that usually gets me through slumps. It's hard to believe I've been in Japan more than two years.