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fall 10: mobile phones as ensemble musical instruments
This course is a refined continuation of the fall'09 course that built up the Michigan Mobile Phone Ensemble. This time we will spend less energy building up hardware, and more time learning technical skill and refining technology. We will be looking at some new emerging aspects of mobile phone performance too, so this sure will remain an exciting course. Again lots of different course numbers for this as it is co-listed in PAT (Music) and EECS, so make sure you find your course number. This course is intended for senior undergraduates and entering graduate students. Programming background is required though we will have a suitable learning curve where even students with lesser experience in programming will have a pathway to ultimately create complex new musical instruments. Our platform will be Apple iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads. We will be using urMus as a primary developing environment, but we will also learn about the nuts and bolts of low-level audio and other sensor programming. Once we have learned how to develop mobile music instruments, we will start looking at performance practices and composition for an ensemble like this and end with a concert where we perform all new pieces! Plan is to make it open to the public! (This course is supported by a Curriculum Innovation Grant by the Office of the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Affairs, University of Michigan. Thanks!)
winter 10: acoustics & psychoacoustics
If a tree falls in a wood and noone is around does it make a sound? The answer to this question depends on your epistemology, or more simply on whether you think of sound as a psychological or physical quantity. We look at both at the same time in this course! We study what sounds (oscillations, pressures, wave equations, strings, tubes, rooms, voices and all that!) and why and how we can hear things (ears, just-noticable-differences, critical bands, gestalt principles) and why we sometimes cannot (masking, illusions, perceptual invariants). Overall we mix lots of fun math (yay!) with interesting, sometimes unexpected hearing experiments (could you say easily when exactly a sound is twice as loud?). All that and more going on in the course this semester.
fall 09: building a mobile phone orchestra
The Mobile Phone Orchestra is coming to the University of Michigan! This is the first course ever to teach how to set up, suffer through, learn and perform with a mobile phone orchestra. Lots of different course numbers for this as it is co-listed in PAT (Music) and EECS, so make sure you find your course number. This course is intended for senior undergraduates and entering graduate students. This is a brand new course, so we'll all have to learn as we go! Our platform will be Apple iPhones and iPod Touches. Basic requirement for the course is some solid programming skills. On top of that the rest is optional. We will start from scratch and slowly build up the infrastructure for the orchestra as we go. We will do low level audio and other sensor programming, but also use higher level constructs and environments. Once we have the hardware and software ready, we'll start looking at performance practices and composition for an ensemble like this and end with a concert where we perform all new pieces! Plan is to make it open to the public! (This course was made possible by generous contributions by the College of Engineering and the Division of Computer Science & Engineering as well as Apple. Thanks!)
advising
I'm looking for bright and motivated Ph.D. students interested in Human-Computer Interaction, DSP and Numerical Methods with application to Music Performance and other areas. Specifically I'm looking for students interested in the following areas: Mobile HCI, Tangible and Tactile User Interfaces, Real-time Physical Simulation (primarily of sound), Interface Design (Electronics), Computational Differential Geometry and Structure-Preserving Methods in Numerical Solutions of Partial Differential Equations, Discrete Oscillators and Deterministic Chaos. Interested candidates should email .