Dannenberg’s Audacity on PC World’s 100 Best Products List
The month of June provides a welcome break from the hectic end-of-semester activities that take place in April and May. And two weeks without any travel! The department is quieter, with most of the undergraduates gone, some of the graduate students away on internships, and lots of faculty traveling to conferences and other meetings.
But now things are cranking up again. It looks like I’ll be on the road for at least part of every week for the rest of the summer. Today I am in San Francisco, for the ACM awards banquet. Avrim Blum and Alyosha Efros will be inducted as ACM Fellows, and of course Ed Clarke will receive the Turing Award. I’ll post a report on the festivities in the next day or so.
The purpose of this article is to comment on the inclusion of Audacity as one of PC World’s 100 Best Products for 2008. Audacity is an open source audio editor, created by Dominic Mazzoni and Roger Dannenberg. It is an elegant, simple, and reliable audio editor. It’s also snappy, making use of a novel data structure that supports constant time editing operations (such as cut, past, undo, redo, etc) — much faster than most commercial editors. Audacity also has a plug-in scripting language called Nyquist. Interestingly, Nyquist is a mostly functional programming language.
Roger’s main research, of course, is in computer music. Recently, his robotic bagpiper, McBlare, was exhibited at the National Academies. An accomplished jazz trumpeter, Roger has developed a range of novel music understanding, improvisation, and authoring systems and algorithms, in some cases going on national performance tours. While Roger has been doing this type of research at Carnegie Mellon for about 20 years, in the past few years I’ve detected a surge of interest in the intersection of computing and the arts. There has always been a tradition of technology and the arts in the School of Computer Science, not only in the work of Roger but also in the Robotics Institute. (For a recent example, see Keepon.) But there are now a large number of very interesting and highly technical artists in the School of Art, School of Music, and School of Architecture. See, for example, the work of people like Golan Levin (Professor of Interactive Media), Noel Zahler (new Head of School of Music), and Mark Gross (Professor of Architecture). At least two new art+technology faculty are being recruited (one in HCI and one in Art). The local community of “hybrids” between computer science and the fine arts is vibrant and growing, albeit still a bit disorganized. I expect this community to gel into a more recognizable entity within the next year or two.
Already, in the education realm, we are seeing a lot of progress. We are launching, jointly with the College of Fine Arts, a new Bachelor of Computer Science and the Arts (BCSA) program. This program, which is quite rigorous, provides a deep blend of computer science with either Drama, Art, or Music. In the fall, Golan Levin will teach an experimental section of 15-100 (intro CS), using Processing (an open-source library for interactive media) as the foundation. Also nearly approved and ready for launch is a pair of programs in Music and Technology, one at the bachelor’s level and another at the master’s level. (A public announcement will be made after the university approves the program.) These new programs, coupled with the already successful Masters in Entertainment Technology program offered by the Entertainment Technology Center, have attracted the notice of a large number of entertainment companies and studios. Watch this space for announcements of these several other new developments, coming soon.
In the mean time, congratulations to Roger and Dominic!
Peter Lee @ June 21, 2008