Center for New Music and Audio Technologies
The UC Berkeley Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) houses programs in research, pedagogy and public performance that are focused on the creative interaction between music and technology.
Research
The CNMAT research program is linked with other disciplines and departments on campus such as architecture, mathematics, statistics, mechanical engineering, computer science, electrical engineering, psychology, cognitive science, physics, space sciences, the Center for New Media, and the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. CNMAT's events program offers a range of concerts, lectures and other events informed by our research and pedagogy efforts. CNMAT's research areas include:
• New sensor technologies and interface modalities: sensor fusion, integration. New sense-enabled media: conductive/resistive fibre, malleable media.
• Many-channel digital audio interfaces; hundreds of channels over common ethernet. FPGA-based system development.
• Parallel computing theory in music/audio computing; algorithms, requirements.
• Digitizing tablets, multitouch and manytouch surfaces.
• New user-interfaces for interaction with expressive musical/auditory environments, e.g. spatial mapping with dimensionality reduction.
• Theoretical and applied spatial acoustics of loudspeaker and microphone arrays, especially in spherical configurations
• Musical quality; metrics, augmentation, compression, hearing loss.
• Signal-theory for musical gestures; requirements on jitter and latency, expressive bandwidth estimation
• Semantics, requirements and cognitive models of music performance and their implications for software design patterns
• Sound analysis for event detection, pitch and noise estimation and auditory perceptual models
• Machine learning applications in audio synthesis and musical control
• Auditory psychophysics and music cognition
• Development of software tools including Open Sound World, MaxMSP.
• Protocol and format development including Open Sound Control (OSC) and the Sound Description Interchange Format (SDIF)
Pedagogy
CNMAT's pedagogy program is highly integrated with the Department of Music's graduate program in composition. We offer a wide range of opportunities for UC Berkeley students and outside scholars, artists, and music lovers. The CNMAT Max/MSP/Jitter Depot is an online library of software that is freely available for download and use: included are tools for artists and researchers, educational materials for students and teachers, and complete musical works for exploration and analysis. The Music Information Center is an online annotated list of web resources in computer music and new music in general, recommended by the CNMAT community. From tutorials on recording technique to residencies for composers, from the history of electronic music to third-party externals for Max/MSP, the Music Information Center is an ever-growing directory of materials concerned with new music in general and the creation of electronic and computer music. CNMAT offers a changing menu of summer workshops, with recent training in Max/MSP, Jitter, and sensors. These intensive workshops provide attendees with a comprehensive look at the implications of the technology in question for research and artistic creation, while also developing the familiarity with the fundamentals necessary for continued study. Students leave each workshop with an array of tools to explore and use in their own work.
Public Outreach
In our Sound Spatialization Theater, we present concerts that cross cultural and musical barriers and provide a forum for diverse lectures and demonstrations for students, faculty and the community.