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12
W hat makes music
sound good?
And, how can we
make music elec-
tronically? Cluster
Nine’s first week
addressed both of
these questions. On
day one we learned
about the physics of
notes, and built
electronic wave generators with
“Little Bits”. We mixed tones to
make beat frequencies. We tested
our ears by generating tones we
thought would be perfect fourths
and fifths, and checked to see how
close we were. One of us tuned an
A by ear to 441 Hz (only missed it
by one!)
Tuesday was our first day
of Science Communication. The day
started off with a very
interesting discovery lec-
ture from Thomas Bew-
ley, a professor at UCSD.
With a very energetic
attitude, he talked to all
of us about robotics and
some life lessons. He was
extremely passionate
about everything he said,
and he was truly inspiring. After the
lecture, the entire cluster went up
to another room to talk about the
lecture. Before we dove into Pro-
fessor Bewley’s lecture, we got to
know each other a little more. We
thoroughly learned everyone’s
names and then began discussing
the lecture. About half the cluster
participated in a Socratic Seminar
discussion to provide our thoughts
about the lecture.
After lunch, the
other half of
them in a hat.
Then each person
took a question
and talked about
it to the cluster
for about two
minutes. We
wrapped up the day by introducing
an essay about ethical issues in the
field of music technology and began
brainstorming ideas.
Wednesday morning start-
ed off with a lecture about embed-
ded electronics, complete with a
live demonstration of a motion-
controlled music program. This was
followed by a presentation on con-
sonance and dissonance, and, using
Audacity, students lis-
tened firsthand to the
beating sound (called
“roughness”) generat-
ed by playing two
slightly different fre-
quencies. Next came
classes in the lab, and
students installed Can-
opy onto their com-
puters and began to
learn the syntax of Python, covering
the basics of variables, plotting, and
for loops. The day ended with an
impromptu jamming session, and
everybody, even the instructors,
pulled out their instruments, Little
Bits, or microphones to make some
music.
CLUSTER 9: MUSIC AND TECHNOLOGY
12
Should we let AI compose for us? That’s the question of the week.
Thursday, Day 4 was a very
nice and mellow day. We started with
a belly full of fresh breakfast, and a decent amount of sleep, although no
amount of sleep can fully satisfy any
teenager. First, we headed to Center Hall to listen to a highly informative
lecture on the library at UCSD. We
learned about the catalogue, and how e-books could work better than tangible
books.
We then learned about the
various databases UCSD offers, and how to use them, all of which was very
useful information.
Soon after, we stayed in Cen-ter Hall, but proceeded to one of the
rooms in the upper floors, so that our
class Teacher Fellow, Eric Burtson,
could give us a brief lecture on sound and waves. We learned about waves
and all the various harmonics. We
learned about beat frequencies, and what makes a chord sound good.
Afterwards, we were assigned
a biography presentation, in which we
had to research a famous musician and present their life to the cluster.
We then made our way to
lunch, and soon after, the Geisel Li-
brary where we worked on our ethics essay and biography assignments. It
was an amazing library. The view from
CLUSTER 9: MUSIC AND TECHNOLOGY
minutes and 33 seconds of silence, as well as Theremin’s invention (called the
theremin) which uses proximity sensors
to play different pitches. A highlight of
the day was guest Mike Gao’s presenta-tion on his app Polyplayground. Mike, a
former graduate from UCSD and cur-
rently a well-known DJ, showed us how to play different chords just by touching
a couple tiles on an iPad. We had lots
of fun playing with the app! Tuesday started off with another Discovery Lec-
ture, this time from Elsa Cleland, a pro-
fessor of ecology and environmental
change at UCSD. She talked to us about her findings about threats to biodiversi-
ty, as well as some advice and tips. After
discussing our thoughts about the lec-ture in the classroom, we learned how
to add waves together and draw the
result. Before lunch, we reviewed Mon-
day’s lecture about Fourier series and timbre, which is what makes instru-
ments sound different from one anoth-
er, and used a PHET simulation to visu-alize adding waves. After eating lunch
and talking about the app we saw on
Monday, we had time to peer review our ethics essays, giving suggestions to
others and editing our own writing.
Wednesday morning began
with us returning to audacity to look deeper into different types
of sound waves. We then
went back to the labs to get another lesson in Py-
thon. We were finally able
to create music with our
code! After lunch, we had a guest speaker talk to us
about her projects with
computers that compose music! It told us a lot
about certain “rules” mu-
sic has that makes it enjoy-able. Then it was back to the labs to
start working with embedded electron-
ics. We learned about a small computer
called Raspberry Pi that we will get to use in our future projects. --Aditya,
Melissa, Valerie, Jerry, Ian
the sixth floor was fantastic, and the multitude of books was more than over-
whelming. Finally, at 4:00, we headed
back to our suites. Overall, it was an
amazing day full of learning, and produc-tive work time.
On Friday, instructor Colin
started class with a demonstration of a
robot powered by Raspberry Pi, a credit card sized computer, which played au-
dio as it moved forward. Professor
Shlomo continued with a lecture on Fourier transform and analysis, examin-
ing the composition of sound waves as a
combination of sine and cosine waves.
Later, students downloaded the Ableton software, which allowed
us to overlay sound
tracks, write drum beats, and record audio. The
day concluded with an
explanation of assigned
homework, which intro-duced us to coding music
in Python.
On Monday, we had our first experience
of riding the shuttle to
class. We learned about how music could be represented with
geometry in Professor Dubnov’s morn-
ing lecture. At the lab, some of our
fellow classmates gave presentations on John Cage and Léon Theremin. We
were fascinated to learn about Cage’s 4
14
Friday was Cluster 9
FIELD TRIP DAY!!! We took a
bus to Qualcomm to learn
more about the newest devel-
opments in technology. First, we went to the Game Develop-
ers Demonstration Room and
learned about how the develop-
ers programmed the latest
games with life-like graphics.
We even took turns testing out
the Oculus Rift, VR goggles!
After taking a lunch break, we
visited the Qualcomm Circuit
Factory and saw how circuits
were made with amazing speed
and accuracy. We then saw de-
mos of the Snapdragon's latest
CLUSTER 9: MUSIC AND TECHNOLOGY
tions days saw us completing our
ethics essays. Though most of
these centered on the creativity-crushing effect of music piracy,
papers ranged in topic, including
permanent hearing loss from
headphones and the questiona-
ble practice of cleaning up sub-
par singing voices. We also
started prepping for our project
poster-display.
We spent much of yes-
terday in the lab, working with
Joe, Colin, Shlomo, and Mauri-
cio, who guided us through vari-
ous approaches to make our
projects awesome! --Kalen, Da-
rius, Eric
technologies, such as Voice Acti-
vation, Ultrasound Fingerprint-
ing, and amazing 7.1 Surround
Sound! Overall, this field trip
was a very exciting day!
Week three of Cluster 9
started out with a bang! Literally!
We spent our morning lecture
time learning about the graphical
programming language PureData,
and its various controls and
commands. We used PD to cre-
ate a 3 oscillator synthesizer
with a waveform analyzer. We
also learned how to load and
control a .wav audio file with
simple PD code. After a lunch at
the Canyon Vista cafeteria, we
went to the lab and continued
working on PureData, this time
with our Raspberry Pi Linux
computers. Near the end of
class, we brainstormed some
ideas for the final project and
started getting in our groups.
We have some really cool ideas,
and we can’t wait to show them
to everyone next week!
The science communica-
12
On Thursday July 23rd, we examined an abstract on acous-matic sound which refers to elec-tronic music that is played through speakers rather than being per-formed live. Afterwards, we had a presentation on music composed using a computer program known as Logic Pro.
Then, two guest speakers came to tell us what they do in music. The first guest speaker was Music For Peace, an organization that works with both kids and adults to create songs for a good cause. Javier and Tonia showed us what it is like to record a song with the help of Darius, Avneesh and Charmhel. Javier also showed us examples of songs he had com-pleted in the past. The second guest speaker was an interesting man. Patrick Hadley had worked with a partner to come out with the Array Mbira. The classic Mbira was a South Afri-
CLUSTER 9: MUSIC AND TECHNOLOGYCLUSTER 9: MUSIC AND TECHNOLOGYCLUSTER 9: MUSIC AND TECHNOLOGY Overall, it was a very productive and fun day. Cluster 9 started the final week finishing up final projects. Eve-ry group finalized their project ide-as, from one group creating a filter processor that controls the out-come of a song to another group programming a robot that detects
the source of sound. With diverse ideas, each group was able to incor-porate information that was taught during lectures. Groups used either Raspberry Pi’s, Arduino, Python, Pure Data, sensors, and other ma-terials that would allow all to get their project working. During the whole day we were working with Colin, Eric, Mauricio, Joseph and Shlomo in order to figure out the program languages or figure out the hardware. Each group is on their way to completing a successful pro-ject. --Audria, Sophie, Amelia, Ad-itya, Charmhel, Eric
can instrument played by plucking steel tines. However, Mr. Hadley had arranged these tines in a specif-ic pattern to make it very easy to play and very easy to learn. In fact, we found out through his speech that Taylor Swift had used his Mbira in her song Clean. His Array Mbira also appears in the sound mix of
later Breaking Bad episodes and cur-rent Better Call Saul programs. He showed us how lovely the instru-ment sounded by playing it himself, and then allowed us to play with it ourselves. Without any prior knowledge of the instrument, we were able to play it decently thanks to the special arrangement of tines. By the end, everyone was left in awe and amazement. Overall, it was a lovely presentation by Patrick Hadley. On Friday, we spent the entire day working on our final pro-jects. First thing in the morning, we headed straight to the lab where we have all the tools to work on our projects. For many students, this was our first long session where we were able to work on our projects. These final projects use a wide variety of programs that we have learned throughout COS-MOS. The TAs and the professors circulated throughout the class to help us when we had trouble.