At the CMC, computers don’t just work—they also play

At 3 a.m. some nights in Butler, it can feel like your computer is talking to you. But what if it began to analyze your speech and turn it into a live video-light show? Helped you build robotic autoharps, glitchy cut-and-paste video manipulations, and music made from genetic algorithms? Or even kinetic sculptures that respond to the wind and crazy weird electronic music of all kinds?

Tucked away on the third floor of Prentis Hall on 125th Street, Columbia’s Computer Music Center situates itself exactly at this intersection of musical expression and technology.

Despite its unfortunately low profile on campus, the CMC is the oldest research center of its kind in the Western Hemisphere. Established in the 1950s as the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, it has since broken its orange-and-black ties even as it retains its position at the forefront of multimedia and computer music research.

And, although computers and music may not be the most obvious of bedfellows, CMC Director Brad Garton said, “My view is that using computers to make music is the same as using a piano.”

Fittingly, most of the Rockefeller grant that helped to establish CMC went towards the world’s first programmable synthesizer, the then-revolutionary room-sized RCA synthesiser. The RCA can still be found at the center, displayed along with an array of restored, and mostly functional synths, amps, and mixers from an older age.

While electronic music has rapidly developed from its magnetic-tape-splicing beginnings, the center has not missed a beat in evolving right along with it. Today, students and staff alike spin their own experimental music software, some of it even open source, and release it free online.

Sleek computers now wrestle for space with audiovisual installations and sculptures, not to mention the unique Manta controller and invented instruments built by grad student Jeff Snyder. Snyder’s work runs the gamut from experimental to "electro-country" music to remixes for the likes of Public Enemy.

Another grad student, Daniel Iglesia, channels aural chaos and video manipulations to create real-time generative pieces designed to subsume the role of the DJ or VJ. There are also literary allusions, from an ode to Jules Verne to the work “Hamletized,” which slowly transmogrifies Richard Burton’s famous reading into a quiet stuttering shuffle.

Interdisciplinary and even city-wide collaborations are quite the norm for the center. Particularly notable is the MusicEngineeringArtProject, or MEAP, a collaboration with the electrical engineering department, and the monthly dorkbot meetings in Soho, where, according to their website, people do “strange things with electricity.”

As the CMC does not currently have its own degree-granting program, its students are drawn primarily from the music, computer science, and electrical engineering departments.

Given the makeup and often gendered culture of these departments, the space can be quite male-dominated. This is, however, somewhat balanced out in the courses, many of which are co-run with the visual arts department, and tend to attract a more diverse array of students.

The courses are extremely project-oriented, equipping students with the technological know-how to realize their weirdest electro-musical dreams and show the end products on campus and around the city.

This is not to say that there’s much hand-holding, however. “If you’re interested in doing something different or unusual with electronics or computers, or making your computer interact with you to make sound art, or whatever crazy idea you have that involves computers and sound, you can get the skills you need to pull it off by taking the CMC classes and putting in your own self-motivated effort,” Snyder said.

Current offerings range from basic electroacoustics to sound art and multimedia sculpture, though there are also occasional one-off experimental courses.

The MIDI and Recorded Sound classes come especially recommended by Snyder, although the latter can have waiting list of up to three years. And while the musical and technological aspects may seem daunting, Director of Research Douglas Repetto is quick to point out, “We are super accessible. For our intro classes you need no prior experience at all, in either music or tech [or] software. We’ve had lots of complete beginners take our classes and bloom into crazed electro-artists.”