Foundations of Music Technology

Jordan Natan Hochenbaum is an artist concerned with finding meaningful connections among music, art, and technology. His work involves designing novel interfaces for musical performance, multimodal sensor systems, and playing and composing in a wide range of musical styles. Hochenbaum actively releases music under the Natan H moniker. As co-founder of FlipMu, he has explored interactive works for large-scale multitouch surfaces, real-time data sonification, generative audio/visual systems, and open-source interface design. Together with Owen Vallis and Jasmin Ruiz Blasco, he has been working as The Noise Index, an art-and-research platform that explores questions emerging from increased access to information in the digital age.

In 2013 Jordan completed his PhD titled L’Arte di Interazione Musicale: New Musical Possibilities through Multimodal Techniques. Recently he has worked on anomaly detection at Twitter, while also on faculty at California Institute of the Arts, where he teaches a variety of classes in the Music Technology department. Jordan’s work has been featured online and in print, including Wired, Computer Arts, Make, and XLR8R Magazine, The Creators Project, on Processing.org and Rhizome.org, and at festivals and conferences including Google I/O, NASA’s Yuri’s Night, the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, the International Society for Music Information Retrieval, and the International Computer Music Conference.

Owen Vallis is a Professor of Music Technology at the California Institute of the Arts, MTIID (Music Technology: Interaction, Intelligence, and Design program). As co-founder of Flip-Mu, he explores and designs open-source interface design, real-time data sonification, generative audio/visual systems, and large-scale multitouch surfaces. With Jordan Hochenbaum and Jasmin Ruiz Blasco, he founded The Noise Index, a research platform to explore questions emerging from increased access to information and information saturation, with installations in New York, London, Paris, and L.A. Owen received his Ph.D. in 2013 at the New Zealand School of Music, Victoria University of Wellington. During his graduate research, he focused on developing new musical interfaces, interactive musical agents, and large networked music ensembles including The Machine Orchestra. Over the past 10 years, he has: worked as a research scientist for Twitter; developed multi-touch interfaces for Nokia research labs; worked for leading ribbon microphone manufacturer Royer Labs; has had musical production featured in major motion films; designed and built recording facilities; and produced, engineered, and mixed records in Tokyo, Nashville, and Los Angeles. Owen’s work has been featured in Wired, Future Music, Pitchfork, XLR8R, Processing.org, computer arts magazine, and shown at events such as NASA’s Yuri’s Night, Google I/O, and the New York Cutlog art festival.

Ajay Kapur is currently the Director of the Music Technology program (MTIID) at the California Institute of the Arts, as well as the Associate Dean for Research and Development in Digital Arts. He received an Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in 2007 from University of Victoria combining computer science, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, music and psychology with a focus on intelligent music systems and media technology. Ajay graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University in 2002. Kapur has published over 100 technical papers and presented lectures across the world on music technology, human computer interface for artists, robotics for making sound, and modern digital orchestras.

Spencer Salazar is a computer musician and researcher currently serving as Special Faculty at the California Institute of the Arts School of Music. His research and teaching is focused on mobile music software, systems for music programming, and computer-based music ensembles. Previously he pursued his doctoral studies at Stanford CCRMA, where his dissertation research concerned a modular sketch-based programming system for computer music. He has also created new software and hardware interfaces for the ChucK audio programming language, prototyped consumer electronics for Microsoft, and architected large-scale social music interactions for Smule, an iPhone application developer. He received a Bachelor of Science and Engineering in Computer Science from Princeton University in 2006 and received a Doctor of Philosophy degree (Ph.D.) in Computer-based Music Theory and Acoustics from Stanford University in 2017.