This class is one of the very few like it in the world and currently the only one at an undergraduate level that I know of. Not only is it fun to teach, but since there’s no normal syllabus for a class like this, the students help craft its directions based on what they want to get out of the class.
About me: I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I grew up. I loved math and computers, and people told me I was pretty good at them, and I really, really loved music. In high school, I did a lot of programming (Commodore 64 and the amazing Amiga computer) and then got bored with it, majored in music at the inferior institution two-T-stops-up-Mass.-Ave.-not-named-Lesley. Around the time I graduated, the web took off, and suddenly, for the first time, computers could be a way not just to make things by yourself or for yourself (or a company) but for the world! I was hooked again and threw myself into web development and algorithms, working for an economics research firm. All the while, I was composing and writing my doctoral thesis on reconstructing fragments of music from 14th-century Italy. Sometimes, music and computers overlapped (like using an algorithm for Spam detection to classify the rhythmic modes of West African music), but mostly, they did not.
Then, I was fortunate to get my position at MIT mostly to do medieval and contemporary music, and suddenly, this was the perfect place to combine my two passions. I received a grant and over those next 4 years wrote (with post-doc and student help) the first version of music21, and I’ve been developing it ever since. When you read this, I’m probably reviewing a pull request or writing more docs. I’ve developed tools for automatically giving feedback on music theory assignments and finally used computers to solve the problem of identifying medieval music, which is what motivated everything.
I’m proud to be an Okinawan-American and in the first generation of my family to attend college. I’m originally from San Diego, and outside of the semester I return to Honolulu, Hawai’i, where my wife Elina is a professor of medieval and Japanese music at UH Mānoa.
Your history is undoubtedly different from mine. But whatever it is, there is a place for you in computational music analysis if that’s what you want to do! Every new person adds to the richness of the field. Add your story!
- Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert
