WHO: ADRIAN FREED, RESEARCH DIRECTOR
WHAT: CENTER FOR NEW MUSIC AND AUDIO TECHNOLOGIES, UC BERKELEY
WHY: TO RESEARCH AND DEVELOP TECH TOOLS MUSICIANS AND ARTISTS CAN
USE TO ENHANCE LIVE PERFORMANCES
Ensconced in a Spanish-style home on
the northern border of the UC Berkeley
campus, the researchers at the Center
for New Music and Audio Technologies,
CNMAT ( cnmat.berkeley.edu), are working
on a mind-boggling array of projects that
crisscross multiple disciplines. On the day we
visit CNMAT research director Adrian Freed,
the two graduate
students we run into
on our tour happen
to be working on
advanced degrees
in mathematics and
history—and both
use Mac laptops
safeguarded from
accidental pickup by
fellow researchers
with name tags
created on a digital
label maker.
In the small
performance space on
the building’s main floor, Freed slides back
the curtain on a closet built into the wall to
reveal a spherical loudspeaker—technically
an icosahedron—that houses 120 separate
speaker arrays and, when plugged into a
MacBook Pro with a USB cable, registers
as an audio device with 120 separate
channels in OS X’s Sound System
Preferences pane.
Trying to convey the magic of the
spherical speaker, which was developed
with funding from speaker maker Meyer
Sound, “doesn’t make sense in words—you
have to be there,” Freed says. But he can’t
resist describing it anyway: “It will beam
sounds around, like a lighthouse or a laser
beam beams light. Most people have never
experienced that because most sound
sources spread sound from the source
evenly outward in all directions. The
spherical speaker lets you do all sorts of
interesting things, including beam-forming
narrow beams, multiple beams, moving the
beams around in space, and so on.” Part of
the motivation for developing the spherical
speaker was to make electronic music
sound as natural and “with presence” as live
acoustic music, especially when the two are
played together, Freed says.
“My boss has been traveling around,
performing interactive computer music” in
as portable a way as possible, Freed says
of CNMAT codirector David Wessel, “but he
notices when he plays in ensembles with
acoustic instruments
that he’s kind of a
second-class citizen
because his sound
from a conventional
loudspeaker doesn’t
interact as well
as the acoustic
instruments. There’s
a kind of physical
presence that the
acoustic instruments
have that electronic
instruments don’t.
It’s because there’s
only one loudspeaker,
and loudspeakers totally smudge sound
out evenly, whereas acoustic instruments
send sound out in different frequencies and
different directions.”
Freed recently finished a project in which
he built a stringless cello out of acrylic for
world-famous cellist Frances-Marie Uitti,
who, after pioneering the simultaneous
use of two bows to coax more and different
sounds out of her traditional cello, turned to
CNMAT to help her uncover still more ways
to experiment with her instrument. “It’s
played like a cello but doesn’t have strings,”
says Freed of the cello he built for her. “It
plugs in through the USB port to a Macintosh
laptop, and the laptop makes all the sound.
It was all made of acrylic and you bow brass
rods instead of bowing strings, and then you
touch multitouch sensors with one hand and
press position- and pressure-sensing strips
with the other.”
Much the way Kobe Bryant worked
directly with Steve McDonald (see p28) of
the Nike Innovation Kitchen to develop his
eponymous line of basketball shoes, Uitti,
who lives in Amsterdam, came to Berkeley
This “spherical” speaker is really an icosahedron.
555)- M|L FEB•09 www.maclife.com
and spent three weeks on the lower floors
of the CNMAT facility to help perfect
the acrylic cello, which she wanted to fit
precisely between her knees. Seeking
the right curve shape for the acrylic
body of the instrument, Uitti discovered
serendipitously that the diameter of a
10-gallon plastic water jug (the kind that
sits atop Alhambra water coolers across
the country) matched perfectly. So she
and Freed took such a jug to the plastic-bending room at TechShop in Silicon
Valley, where they laser-cut, etched, and
heated the acrylic, then formed it around
the jug.
“One of the kinds of things we do is take
the existing ways people play instruments,
and we take the bit that makes sound away
from it, just leaving the bit that involves
people’s gestures,” says Freed. “Then we
capture as much of the gesture as we can,
