Musical controllers as inspiration and testbed for HCI research (and artistic fun)

Speaker
Perry Cook
Associate Professor of Computer Science, Princeton University

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

Many striking lessons from our history and experiences with intimate, expressive objects lie in the blurred boundaries between musical player,controller, and sound-producer. This presentation will look at some of the issues, and recent projects, in the concurrent design of musical controllers and computer synthesis algorithms. Specific cases will be described and demonstrated where the traditional engineering approach of building a controller (a box), and connecting it to a synthesizer (another box) would never have yielded the final product that resulted from the tightly coupled development of a complete musical system all at the same time. Examples will be given of where a discovery within the synthesis algorithm development suggested a new control metaphor, and where a control component suggested a new aspect of the synthesis algorithm.

Speaker's Bio

Perry Cook received a BA in music from the University of Missouri at Kansas City Conservatory of Music, a BSEE from the University of Missouri Engineering School, and Masters and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. He served as Technical Director for the Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, and has consulted and worked in the areas of DSP, image compression, music synthesis, and speech processing for NeXT, Media Vision, Interval Research, and other companies. He is currently Associate Professor of Computer Science with a joint appointment in Music at Princeton University, researching human-computer interfaces for the control of sound and music, auditory display, and immersive sound environments. He received a 2003 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship to write a new book (his third).

Speaker's Website
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~prc/

Host
Roger Dannenberg