Overview
The Computer Music Center (CMC) at Columbia University is a community hub and a technical facility supporting creativity-first experimentation in music composition and performance, sound art, audio technologies, and music and sound studies scholarship. The 6000 sq/ft state-of-the-art facility occupies the same footprint as the historic Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in Prentis Hall on Columbia's Manhattanville Campus on 125th Street. The CMC has a recording studio, an electronic music studio, a 12.1 channel spatial audio and immersive media research lab, a fabrication and circuits design workshop, a technology-rich seminar room, as well as numerous faculty and student studio spaces. Additionally, the Computer Music Center, in collaboration with the Center for Ethnomusicology, supports a sound-technology teaching and recording space on the 8th floor of Dodge Hall.
The Computer Music Center supports the coursework and research of the faculty, staff, and students in the undergraduate music major and minor as well as the DMA and PhD programs in the Department of Music and collaborates with faculty across campus on interdisciplinary research. In collaboration with the Visual Arts Program in the School of the Arts, the CMC hosts the MFA program in Sound Art.
There are many opportunities for involvement in CMC activities. Students, researchers and creative artists working at the Center come from many different divisions within Columbia University. The CMC also produces events aimed at reaching out to a wider community, both locally in New York and globally in a number of different international venues.
The CMC is committed to providing a welcoming and accessible environment that reduces friction to access and creativity for communities that have been marginalized in technology education and research. Classes are open to undergraduate and graduate students in all departments of the Columbia University, Teacher's College, and Barnard College. In addition, a number of guest composers and researchers have come to the CMC from all over the world to take advantage of our unique expertise and facilities.
“Some time in the fall of 1951 a professional Ampex tape recorder arrived to the Department of Music at Columbia University. For several weeks it sat in an imposing packing box under one of the tables without revealing its potential threat to invade the traditional assumption that music is conceived in terms of musical instruments and that composer’s obligation ends with presenting a performer or a group of performers with a score which accurately represents his composition. A tape-recorder was, after all, a device to reproduce music, and not to assist in creating it. Having been bought at my instigation to serve in this intended function, it awaited my pleasure to be unpacked. Little did I know that opening the lid of the packing box produced an effect akin to that of Pandora’s box. Having been asked on several occasions to describe the effects of this unsettling experience on my creative life (my wife could tell a lot, if asked, on how it felt to live in a company of three tape recorders in a living room) I find it best in this particular instance to restrict myself to a recounting in a most direct way the evolution of my approach to the opportunities to compose music directly in sound. I must insist that what I have done is music to me; it has been kindly received by a good many people whose opinion I respect.” —Vladimir Ussachevsky