Projects Overview
The projects on this page are a sampling of some of the collaborative work that has come out of the CMC in the last decades. Students and staff at the CMC are constantly creating new music and artworks, putting on concerts and shows, releasing recordings and software, etc. For up to the minute info on CMC community activities, please see the News & Events on our front page and links to individuals’ websites on our CMC People page.
Education and Outreach
Unsung Stories: Women at Columbia's Computer Music Center is a first step focusing on the legacy of women who have studied and worked at the renowned Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (CPEMC; renamed the Computer Music Center [CMC] in 1996). The project includes three parts: a two-day symposium (April 9-10, 2021), a podcast series released in March-April 2021, and a concert in Fall 2021.
The Computer Music Center in collaboration with ISSUE Project Room and NYU Tandon School of Engineering hosted a concert, a workshop, and a series of artist talks and discussion centered around the impact of the design, workflow, philosophy, and creative work made possible by Serge Tcherepnin’s vision of creative sound synthesis, Feb. 15-17 2023.
Featuring a state-of-the art immersive multi-channel audio system surrounded by rare objects, artifacts, and recordings from the early history of electronic music, Sounding Circuits: Audible Histories explores the networks, facilities, and technologies crucial to electronic sound's evolution from the 1950s to today. The exhibition highlights contributions from pioneering composers Otto Luening, Pauline Oliveros, Edgar Varèse, and Charles Dodge. January 15 - March 24, 2019.
The Schomburg Center Junior Scholars Program, part of The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, has paired up with the Computer Music Center to has teaching demo days for using analog synthesizers, making circuits, and using a recording studio, and then having recording sessions to track the students' ideas and work. This culminates in an album of pieces written, performed, and edited by the students.
During the past several years, the CMC has put its combination of well-maintained equipment (analog and digital) and well-trained personnel to good use in doing archive and preservation work. The CMC has successfully completed a number of archive projects, earning a well-deserved reputation as one of the few places available with both the correct equipment and trained expertise to do critical archival work
The CMC brings music technology to children and their teachers. A collaborative project of Ballet Frankfurt, Lego, mak.frankfurt, Paul Kaiser, and the CMC. Sponsored by J.P. Morgan. Participation of local school children organized with the collaboration of the Creative Arts Laboratory of Columbia University’s Teachers College and its city wide artists-in-residence program for schools.
Growing out of classes in computer music at Dartmouth College in the early 1990s, the text Music and Computers was begun by Larry Polansky and Douglas Repetto in 1997 as part of an NSF Math Across the Curriculum (MATC) grant at Dartmouth College. Dan Rockmore, Mary Roberts, and Phil Burk joined as co-authors in 1998, and together we self-published the book online as a freely available resource, and for use in classes co-taught by Polansky and Rockmore.
Research
RTcmix is a real-time software “language” for doing digital sound synthesis and signal-processing. It is written in C/C++, and is distributed open-source, free of charge. In certain respects, it is similar in function to other extant unit-generator-based software languages such as CSOUND, SuperCollider and (to a lesser extent) JSyn and Max/MSP — they do share a common heritage, after all. There are some differences, however, between all these languages… and variety is of course the spice of life!
RTcmix is developed in part by Brad Garton and Dave Topper.
SPEAR is an application for audio analysis, editing and synthesis. The analysis procedure (which is based on the traditional McAulay-Quatieri technique) attempts to represent a sound with many individual sinusoidal tracks (partials), each corresponding to a single sinusoidal wave with time varying frequency and amplitude. SPEAR was written by Michael Klingbeil while he was a DMA student at Columbia.
Finally, a way to control your grungy old pen plotters with your shiny new laptop! Chiplotle is a Python library that implements and extends the HPGL (Hewlett-Packard Graphics Language) plotter control language. It supports all the standard HPGL commands as well as our own more complex drawing commands. Chiplotle also provides direct control of your HPGL-aware hardware via a standard usb<->serial port interface. Chiplotle is developed by Douglas Repetto, Victor Adán.
PeRColate is a collection of synthesis, signal processing, and image processing objects (with source-code toolkit) for Max/MSP, developed by Dan Trueman and R. Luke DuBois.
MEAPsoft is a program for automatically segmenting and rearranging music audio recordings. It is aimed at musicians and experimenters who want to play with new ways to put audio fragments together using state of the art machine listening and analysis techniques. MEAPsoft was a collaborative project between CMC students and staff and Dan Ellis’s LabROSA and was supported by several NSF grants.
Archived Projects
ArtBots was a series of international exhibitions featuring robotic art and art-making robots. It was founded and co-curated by Douglas Repetto.
For each show, we published an open call for submissions, inviting artists from around the world to send us information about their work. We have no fixed definition of what qualifies for the show; if you think it's a robot and you think it's art, we encourage you to submit. The final list of participants is a mix of works selected from the open call submissions and additional artists invited by the ArtBots curators.
dorkbot: people doing strange things with electricity
dorkbot is a monthly meeting where people share their creative work. Started at the CMC in 2000 by Douglas Repetto, dorkbot meetings have spread around the globe.
Re:NEW — FRONTIERS IN CREATIVITY
Thursday, September 30, 2004
Bradford Garton & Elaine Sisman, co-chairs
A one day festival celebrating Columbia’s 250th anniversary, featuring performances by Narratrope, Luibo Borissov & Maja Cerar, Tomie Hahn & Curtis Bahn, George Lewis, Brad Garton, Terry Pender, Dan Trueman, as well as ArtBots installations.
Presented by Lincoln Center.
Curated by The Columbia Computer Music Center.
Around the walls of Columbia University's Low Library rotunda, the Columbia Computer Music Center (CMC) presents a series of cases displaying historical and current CMC activity. The goal of these displays is to illustrate many examples of music, pedagogy, technology, and research done at the CMC from its beginning to the present, and to explain how these efforts have transformed the world of music and education in general.