Peter Narins    Daniel Blumstein    Ricardo Dominguez    Laura Peticolas    Miller Puckette  

 Curtis Roads    Diana Deutsch    Dolores Bozovic    James Marston    Petr Janata    Andrea Polli    Jim Crutchfield  

 Cindy Keefer    Douglas Kahn    Veit Erlmann    Rene Lysloff    Paulo Chagas    Tyler Adams  




 Peter Narins  - UCLA - Department of Physiological Science and Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
My research focuses on the question of how animals extract relevant sounds from the often highly noisy backgrounds in which they live. The techniques I use are the quantitative analysis of vocal behavior of animals in their natural habitats, followed by single fiber neurophysiological recordings in order to elucidate mechanisms underlying signal processing in noise. A second research direction is based on the discovery of the remarkable sensitivity to substrate vibrations possessed by burrowing animals. We are now characterizing and providing accurate measurements of vibrational thresholds as well as exploring the differences between substrate-vibration and airborne sound at the cellular level. Other projects carried out by our group have included an investigation of the neurophysiological basis of sound localization in noisy environments, a study of the temperature-dependence of the representation of time in the vertebrate auditory system, the biophysics of sound localization and the evolution of the middle ear reflex in vertebrates. Current projects include using laser Doppler vibrometry to elucidate the sound pathways relevant for stimulation of both the middle and inner ear in small vertebrates, and using whole-cell voltage clamp techniques to carry out an anatomical and physiological study of the mechanisms underlying transduction in vertebrate sensory hair cells. In addition, we supplement the lab work with direct behavioral observations and controlled acoustic playback studies carried out with animals in their natural habitats. These have included both Old and New World lowland wet tropical forests, African deserts and temperate forests in South America.
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 Daniel Blumstein  - UCLA - Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
Daniel Blumstein received his PhD in Animal Behavior at UC Davis (where he was a Fulbright fellow to Pakistan), and conducted postdoctoral work on anti-predator behavior in Germany (DAAD fellow), the US (NIH-NRSA fellow), and Australia (ARC-postdoctoral fellow). His work combines theoretical studies of the evolution of social behavior, anti-predator behavior, and communication, and seeks to extend and apply insights gained from these theoretical studies to conservation biology and, more recently, national security. He has conducted extensive work with marmots, kangaroos and wallabies, and birds, and less extensive work on other mammals, fish, and lizards. He is an Editor of the journal Animal Behaviour, an Associate Editor of The Quarterly Review of Biology, and serves on the Editorial Boards of Behavioral Ecology and Biology Letters.
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 Ricardo Dominguez  - UC San Diego - Department of Visual Arts
Ricardo Dominguez is a co-founder of The Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), a group who developed Virtual-Sit-In technologies in 1998 in solidarity with the Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico. He is co-Director of Thing (thing.net) an ISP for artists and activists. His recent Electronic Disturbance Theater project with Brett Stabaum, Micha Cardenas and Amy Sara Carroll the *Transborder Immigrant Tool* (a GPS cellphone safety net tool for crossing the Mexico/U.S border was the winner of "Transnational Communities Award", this award was funded by *Cultural Contact*, Endowment for Culture Mexico - U.S. and handed out by the U.S. Embassy in Mexico), also funded by CALIT2 and two Transborder Awards from the UCSD Center for the Humanities. Ricardo is an Assistant Professor at UCSD in the Visual Arts Department, a Hellman Fellow, and Principal/Principle Investigator at CALIT2 (bang.calit2.net). He also co-founder of *particle group* with artists Diane Ludin, Nina Waisman, Amy Sara Carroll a gesture about nanotechnology entitled *Particles of Interest: Tales of the Matter Market* (pitmm.net) that was presented in Berlin (2007), the San Diego Museum of Art (2008), Oi Futuro, and FILE festivals in Brazil (2008).
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 Laura Peticolas  - UC Berkeley - Space Physics Research Group
Laura Peticolas is the Interim Director of the Center for Science Education at the Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley. She is a space scientist whose science focus has been understanding the Aurora (Northern and Southern Lights). Her focus currently is science education. She tries to bridge the most current science with the needs of a variety of audiences, from students to teachers to the general public. She works with musicians to try and bring the notion of the solar wind and its influence on Earth systems to the general public by turning solar wind data into sounds.
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 Miller Puckette  - UC San Diego - Department of Music
Miller Puckette studied mathematics at MIT and Harvard, as an NSF and Putnam fellow, but became a computer music researcher at the MIT Media Lab and then at IRCAM, where he wrote Max. He now teaches music at UCSD and works on the Pure Data environment and on a variety of musical and research projects.
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 Curtis Roads  - UC Santa Barbara - Department of Media Art and Technology
Curtis Roads teaches and pursues research in the interdisciplinary territory spanning music and technology. He was Editor and Associate Editor of Computer Music Journal (The MIT Press) from 1978 to 2000, and cofounded the International Computer Music Association in 1979. A researcher in computer music at MIT (1980-1986), he also worked in the computer industry for a decade. He was invited to teach electronic music composition at Harvard University, and sound synthesis techniques at the University of Naples. He was appointed Director of Pedagogy at Les Ateliers UPIC (later CCMIX) and Lecturer in the Music Department of the University of Paris VIII. Among his books are the anthologies Foundations of Computer Music (1985, The MIT Press) and The Music Machine (1989, The MIT Press). His textbook The Computer Music Tutorial (1996, The MIT Press) is widely adopted as a standard classroom text and has been published in French (1999, second edition 2007), Japanese (2001), and Chinese (2008) editions. He edited the anthology Musical Signal Processing in 1997. His book, Microsound (2002, The MIT Press) presents the techniques and aesthetics of composition with sound particles. Roads's new book is Composing Electronic Music (forthcoming) Oxford University Press. A new revised edition of The Computer Music Tutorial by The MIT Press is also forthcoming. He is keenly interested in the integration of electronic music with visual and spatial media. Since 2004, he has been researching a new method of sound analysis that is the analytical counterpart of granular synthesis called dictionary-based methods (DBMs). This research is sponsored by the National Science Foundation.
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 Diana Deutsch  - UC San Diego - Department of Psychology
Diana Deutsch conducts research on perception and memory for sounds, particularly music. She has discovered a number of musical illusions and paradoxes, which include the octave illusion, the scale illusion, the glissando illusion, the tritone paradox, and the cambiata illusion, among others. She also explores ways in which we hold musical information in memory, and in which we relate the sounds of music and speech to each other. Much of her current research focuses on the question of absolute pitch - why some people possess it, and why it is so rare. Deutsch obtained a First Class Honors B.A. in Psychology, Philosophy and Physiology from Oxford University, and a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California, San Diego. She has over 150 written publications, including books, book chapters, and articles. She is Editor of the book The Psychology of Music, Academic Press, 1982, 2nd Edition 1999, and author of the compact discs Musical Illusions and Paradoxes (1995) and Phantom Words and Other Curiosities (2003).
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 Dolores Bozovic  - UCLA - Department of Physics

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 James Marston  - UC Santa Barbara - Department of Geography
Jim Marston is an Assistant Researcher in the Department of Geography at UCSB. He earned his Ph. D. in 2002 in Geography with an Emphasis in Cognitive Science from UCSB and spent the next 5+ years as a post doc conducting research on UCSB’s Personal Guidance System (PGS). Currently, he is the Principal Investigator at UCSB on a collaborative research project “The Wayfinding Project: Fundamental Issues in Wayfinding Technology” funded by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research. His main research responsibilities include a comprehensive survey of need, travel planning behavior and use, and measures of travel performance. His overall interests include environmental perception, spatial behavior, wayfinding and the spatial problems encountered by those with disabilities, especially visual impairments.
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 Petr Janata  - UC Davis - Department of Psychology and Center for Mind and Brain
Petr Janata is a cognitive neuroscientist who uses music and an array of behavioral, computational, and neuroimaging tools as a means of understanding how the brain organizes complex human behaviors. Beginning as an undergraduate student at Reed College and continuing as a Fulbright Scholar in Vienna, graduate student at the University of Oregon, researcher at Dartmouth College, and currently as a faculty member at the Center for Mind and Brain at UC Davis, he has studied how musical expectations and images are formed and evaluated and how tonality is represented in the brain. His recent work examines how music-evoked autobiographical memories and associated emotions play themselves out in the brain, and how we move to music. He has published extensively in prominent journals, and is currently the principal investigator on a Templeton Advanced Research Program grant from the Metanexus Institute titled Music, Spirituality, Religion, and the Human Brain.
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 Andrea Polli  - University of New Mexico - College of Fine Art and School of Engineering
Andrea Polli’s electronic media works explore global systems and human experience. She often collaborates with atmospheric and climate scientists. Recent works include: a series of sonifications of projected climate change in Central Park and real-time multi-channel sonifications and visualizations of Arctic weather changes and urban air quality. She recently spent seven weeks in Antarctica on a National Science Foundation funded project, 90degreessouth.org, and she is Director of the Interdisciplinary Film and Digital Media Program and Associate Professor of Fine Arts and Engineering at the University of New Mexico.
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 Jim Crutchfield  - UC Davis Department of Physics and Director of The Complexity Science Center
Jim Crutchfield teaches nonlinear physics at the University of California, Davis, directs its Complexity Sciences Center, and promotes science interventions in nonscientific settings. He's mostly concerned with what patterns are, how they are created, and how intelligent agents discover them.
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 Cindy Keefer  - Center for Visual Music, Los Angeles
Cindy Keefer is an archivist and curator, and the Director of Center for Visual Music in Los Angeles, an archive devoted to Visual Music and experimental animation. She curates and presents film programs at museums, festivals, universities and archives worldwide, and consults on media use in museum exhibitions. She has taught, curated, lectured and published on Visual Music internationally, and produced compilation DVDs of the abstract films of Oskar Fischinger and Jordan Belson. She was Adjunct Faculty at the California Institute of the Arts, teaching The History of Experimental Animation, and has been a Guest Lecturer at USC, University of New Mexico ARTSLab, Cal Arts, British Film Institute, and other institutions. She has preserved dozens of Visual Music films by artists including Belson, Fischinger, Jules Engel, John and James Whitney, Charles Dockum, Harry Smith and others. In 1993 she received a Peabody Award and a National Education Association Award for her own work as a director.
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 Douglas Kahn  - UC Davis - Technocultural Studies
Douglas Kahn is Professor of Technocultural Studies at University of California at Davis. He is author of Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (MIT Press, 1999) and The Arts of the Spectrum: In the Nature of Electromagnetism (UC Press, forthcoming); coeditor of The Source Book: Music of the Avant-garde (UC Press, forthcoming), and Mainframe Experimentalism: Experimental Aesthetics and Early Computing (forthcoming), and editor of the journal Senses and Society (Berg). He received a 2006-2007 Guggenheim Fellowship for research in the historical discovery of natural radio.
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 Veit Erlmann  - University of Texas at Austin - Butler School of Music
Veit Erlmann was born and raised in Germany, but lived and worked for almost two decades on three different continents: Europe, Africa and North America. He has taught at University of Natal in Durban and the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, both in South Africa. Appointments in Germany included tenures as Privatdozent at Freie Universitat Berlin and the University of Cologne. In the United States, prior to his appointment as Endowed Chair of Music History at the University of Texas in 1997, he taught as a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Chicago. As an ethnographer, he has done fieldwork in Morocco (1972), Cameroon (1975-1976), Niger (1979), South Africa (1982-1987), Lesotho (1982), Ecuador (1987), Ghana (1989) and most recently a fieldwork project in Sumatra, Indonesia. In addition to his ethnographic work, he has also take a strong interest in musicology, cultural studies and cultural history, primarily in relation to Europe. As part of this historical orientation he has completed a monograph entitled Reason and Resonance: A Cultural History of the Ear to be published by Zone Books (New York) in January 2009.
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 Rene Lysloff  - UC Riverside - Department of Music
Rene T.A. Lysloff is an Associate Professor of Music (Ethnomusicology) at the University of California-Riverside. He has conducted research on traditional and contemporary arts in Central Java for more than twenty years. Lysloff has published articles in Ethnomusicology (Journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology), Asian Theatre, Cultural Anthropology, and other journals and collections (including the Garland Encyclopedia of Music). He also co-edited (with Leslie Gay) Music and Technoculture (2003, Wesleyan University Press), a collection of articles exploring issues related to changing technologies and their impact on cultural practices and epistemologies involving music. His book on Javanese shadow theater will appear in March (KITLV Press). Lysloff is also a performing musician (laptop improvisational and traditional gamelan music) as well as an enthusiastic digital composer.
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 Paulo Chagas  - UC Riverside - Department of Music
Paulo C. Chagas (born in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil) is a composer of international reputation. His music develops a pluralistic aesthetics embracing elements from European and Brazilian traditions. He has composed over 100 pieces ballet music, operas, musical theater works, multimedia works, pieces for orchestra, instrumental and vocal ensembles, electronic and computer music. Chagas is also a theoretician and researcher in music theory and technology. His extensive theoretical work, written in many languages, is being published by international journals. It focuses on subjects of musical semiotics, philosophy and phenomenology of music (Wittgenstein, Flusser), music technology, electroacoustic and digital music. Since 2004, he has been teaching Composition at the University of California, Riverside. He founded and created the Experimental Acoustic Research Studio (EARS), a new facility and center for research, production and performance of electroacoustic music and multimedia.
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 Tyler Adams  - UCLA - Art | Sci Center + Lab and Loyola Marymount University - Department of Art and Art History
Tyler Adams is an artist, educator and the organizer/curator of the Sound + Science Symposium. He is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Art and Art History at Loyola Marymount University and has also taught at UCLA and California State University, Long Beach. As an artist, his work explores perceptual relationships between sound, light, and space.
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