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Saratoga Springs,
New York, 12866
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Collaborative Research (continued)
Skidmore students and their professors have worked together
on numerous research projects. This kind of high-level scholarship
does more than enhances a student's understanding in a given
disipline; the practical, hands-on experience and "real-world"
accomplishment also instill a sense of confidence that will
benefit a graduate in any career. Projects from recent years
appear below, arranged by academic area.
Project: MonsterScope and Supercollider: Development
of stand-alone object-oriented computer applications for interactive
music technology tutorials Participants: Associate Professor
Anthony Holland and Alex Kraus '03 Plan: "Supercollider" is a highly sophisticated computer
program and programming environment that runs on Macintosh computers.
Supercollider is currently considered "state of the art" in
the field of computer music, particularly in the area known
as "general synthesis," that is, a program and environment dedicated
to helping computer music programmers, composers, teachers,
students and pedagogues create absolutely any sound "from scratch."
Supercollider can also be programmed to analyze sound input.
Supercollider will be used to create a program called "MonsterScope."
MonsterScope will be used to analyze both sound waveforms and
sound frequency content (spectrum) for all music technology
classes at Skidmore.
Project: Playing Dhals: Transcription
of Gujarati Devotional Music and Analysis of Melody Types Participants: Associate Professor Gordon Thompson and Kismet al-Hussaini,
'00 Plan: Working with a unique recorded collection of Gujarati
(Indian) devotional songs, we will transcribe (convert aural
information into visional notation) music for analysis. The
first part of the proposed project is lab-oriented work: preparing
taped examples and rendering notations of music. The second
part is analytic: comparing the transcriptions and looking for
similarities and differences in melodic patterns. One reason
this work is important is that previous work (Thompson, 1995)
demonstrates how some of these melodies and the tradition of
performing them bridge larger musical ideas in India. Notably,
"folk" tradition carries in it the seeds of classical praxis.
A number of recent papers among graduate students and young
academics focus on the porous nature of the supposed wall between
"Great" and "Little" traditions.
Creative Thought Matters.
Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway · Saratoga Springs, NY · 12866
