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.