11.30 - Katie is a CRA Outstanding Undergraduates Award Finalist

KatieAnna Wolf is selected as a Finalist in the Computing Research Association's Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award competition for 2011. Congratulations, Katie!

Katie was a DREU summer research fellow at MuCoaCo. She is the second MuCoaCo student to receive this honor; Anna Cheng-Zhi Huang was a Finalist in 2006.

According to the award letter, "This year's nominees were a very impressive group. A number of them were commended for making significant contributions to more than one research project, several were authors or coauthors on multiple papers, others had made presentations at major conferences, and some had produced software artifacts that were in widespread use. Many of our nominees had been involved in successful summer research or internship programs, many had been teaching assistants, tutors, or mentors, and a number had significant involvement in community volunteer efforts. It is quite an honor to be selected a Finalist from this group.

11.22 - ISE 495b KUSC Project

Tianqi Gao and Brad Kuntz, seniors in ISE, were given the KUSC project for the Senior Design class, ISE 495ab.  KUSC is currently the non-profit classical radio station with the largest listener base.  Their task was to find ways to integrated new media into KUSC's current programs to attract younger listeners, especially those in the 30-45 age range.  They were advised by Prof. Chew, and gave their presentation to the class this morning.

11.21 - Discover USC & Engineering Expo

MuCoaCo is part of the university-wide open house. Introductions to and demonstrations of Mimi and MuSA.RT by Isaac Schankler (DMA MUCO '10), Jordan Smith (PhD candidate, ISE), Tim Brochier (Junior, EE, minor in Music Industry), and Chandra Rajagopal (MS EE) take place on the half hour between 1pm and 4pm. Jordan turns out to be a natural at addressing the audiences, Isaac wowed the visitors with his Mimi improvisations, and Tim and Chandra manned the recording station.  In all, they represented a wide spectrum of experiences and backgrounds to show the multidisciplinary opportunities in music engineering research.  We had a surprise visitor, Chandra's dad, who is visiting from San Diego / Australia.

11.07 - Cambridge Brunch

Elaine Chew met with Anna Huang and Jonathan Bragg over brunch at Zoe's.  Anna has just passed her qualifying exams in Computer Science at Harvard, and Jonathan is now in his second year of oboe studies at the New England Conservatory.

11.05/06 - Prosody and Dialog in Language and Music

Elaine Chew and Alexandre François co-organize an Exploratory Seminar on Prosody and Dialog in Language and Music at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.  The seminar brings together scientists, humanists, and artists to examine prosody and dialog in language and music from multiple ideological, scholarly, and technical perspectives with the goal of creating new avenues for scholarly exploration

During the two-day seminar, the participants were treated to a beautiful performance of Persian music on the tar by Bahman Panahi, artist-in-residence at the Harvard Music Department, thanks to Richard Wolf.

Following the introductory presentations of the first day were stimulating discussions at lunch and in the conference room on the connections between music and speech, and future directions for exploration.

11.06 - Jordan @ SMT

Jordan Smith and Chandra Rajagopal stand in front of Jordan's SMT poster on the brick wall at the MuCoaCo Lab

Jordan travels to Indianapolis for the Society of Music Theory meeting and presents a poster on A Comparison and Evaluation of Approaches to the Automatic Formal Analysis of Musical Audio, work based on his Masters thesis with Ichiro Fujinaga at McGill University.