Alumni Magazine - Spring 2008 - (Page 52) New Notes: The Beat Goes Tech Before joining Georgia Tech, Weinberg designed a musical toy that allowed youngsters to make music by doing just that — a stuffed ball swathed in colorful conductive fabric that produces different musical notes when squeezed. With his students at Tech, Weinberg continues to create instruments that will allow people to compose music in new and innovative ways and give people who may not have had the patience to learn to play an instrument earlier in life a second chance at making music. “I want people to get immediate access to the expressive and the creative aspects of creating music, because often, the early stages of learning focus too much on technique. In the beginning it is often difficult to just produce the right tones, and learners can’t see how expressive and fun it can be to play and compose music,” Weinberg says. “We let them into the fun aspects of making music — the creativity, the expression — then later, when they see how great this feeling can be, they will go back and do work on the technique, theory and the formal aspects of music.” Beatbugs allow people young and old, with little or no musical training, to become part of a band. The digital musical instruments, which fit in the palm of your hand, allow players to record live music. The pitch and timbre of the recorded material then may be changed by bending the Beatbugs’ antennae. Players also can send sounds from one Beatbug to another, creating a musical network. “You don’t have to be proficient in music theory to understand the rhythmic manipulations,” Weinberg says. “You can change the rhythm by just exploring new gestures. You can then share it with other people through the network.” But practice does make perfect, even when it comes to Beatbugs. Even though they have an immediacy to them that brings music to the masses, Beatbugs are complex enough that a player must practice to become a pro, Weinberg says. Mastering the Mix t first glance, Flou looks like a computer game. Using a keyboard or a joystick, a player navigates a ship through space. It’s not much of a game though. There’s no gun to shoot and no bullets to dodge — in fact, there are no foes to be found. You can’t score points, ascend to the next level or win. And there’s no “Game Over,” because you can’t lose. Commissioned by New Radio and Performing Arts Inc. for the Networked Music Review research blog, Flou was developed by Jason Freeman, an assistant professor in the music department, and eight students enrolled in a networked music course that he taught during the fall semester. When they received the commission, Freeman says he and his students asked, “What does networked music really mean? How would the kind of piece that we might do as part of that exist on the Web? How would people collaborate with each other?” In Flou, players fly through a 3-D environment encountering clusters of stars and other objects, which when flown through add loops and sound effects to a music mix. “It’s almost like you’re a DJ, accessing an interface in the form of a game,” Freeman says. “As you fly through these things, you get better and better, and you mix together your own things. You’re forming your own version, your own remix, of this composition represented by all these different layers.” Players also have the option of creating their own worlds and sharing them with other users. A live version of Flou is being developed and will premiere in New York. It also will be performed at the music department’s Listening Machines concert April 24 at Eyedrum in Atlanta. To create a mix, visit http://www.jasonfreeman.net/. Making Sense of Music housands of albums were released in the United States in 2007, yet many songs will never make it across the airwaves of your local radio stations. So how will you find out about them? Music discovery Web sites, like Last.fm and Pandora.com, are in the business of creating customized radio streams for visitors by evaluating their favorite songs and culling play lists of similar tracks. Godfrey, whose master’s thesis is focused on contentbased music recognition, finds that the standard algorithms used by most recommendation Web sites are biased toward chart-topping music. “Almost all recommendation or discovery services … base their recommendations on meta data, typically explicit tags applied by users — Metallica can be accurately tagged as heavy metal, for instance — or collaborative filtering — User A likes songs X and Y. If user B likes song X, he will then like song Y. “These algorithms are limited in that popular songs, movies and books will by nature have more data associated with them — more tags, more ratings, more listens — so these are likely to be the recommended items. This leads to a nasty feedback issue of popular items getting more popular, while under-the-radar items never make it out of obscurity,” he says. Godfrey and students in assistant professor Parag Chordia’s course on computational music analysis are strip- T A 52 Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine • Spring 2008 http://www.jasonfreeman.net/ http://Last.fm http://Pandora.com
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