The musician as programmer

The Child as Musician : A Handbook of Musical Development

The surgeon and the musician.

These two quotations encapsulate my personal thinking about music. I cannot imagine my life without listening to music most of the time. Being both a surgeon and an amateur musician, I have been, for a long time, intrigued by the potential relations between medicine and music (Fig. 1). Indeed there have been in history, many famous people who were both musicians and physicians or surgeons [1]. ...

Liminal States: Life as an Indie Musician on Taiwan

In this paper, I examine the liminal states of Taiwanese guitarist/composer Huang Wan-ting, particularly as these states articulate with similar liminal states of “indie music” and the island of Taiwan. I use the term ‘liminal’ in a non-ritual sense to refer to a structural position on the interstices of recognized roles and identities. In addition, I propose a second type of liminality: a posi...

The Death of the Programmer ?

As the field of software development becomes more professionalized and the software development process becomes more formalized, there is a growing belief that the frontline programmer’s job is becoming—or must become, out of economic necessity—de-skilled. In this paper we show that essential aspects of the programming activity involve skills that have not been eliminated by progress in the fie...

Multimodal Musician Recognition

This research is an initial effort in showing how a multimodal approach can improve systems for gaining insight into a musician’s practice and technique. Embedding a variety of sensors inside musical instruments and synchronously recording the sensors’ data along with audio, we gather a database of gestural information from multiple performers, then use machine-learning techniques to recognize ...