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My interests
My research interests lie in the area of music exploration tools. My interests in improvisation draws me towards software that can stimulate in the creative and spontaneous process of music creation. I have worked in projects such as:
- Probabilistic Voice-Substitution Karaoke: Used audio mosaicing and audio-to-audio alignment techniques to ‘control’ the tempo and amplitude of a pre-recorded voice track [more info].
- Online Drumming Project: Collaborated with John Bowker and Ian Knopke on a Java application that will allow people to initially drum over the web, but could be extended to any kind of music that slowly evolves, such as trance and techno music, or improvised jams over a short sequence of chords. [See Bowker's system in action (Youtube)].
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Online Art Gallery: Nayabei.com
I have heard of the wonders of Ruby on Rails and its MVC framework. Therefore I decided to learn it myself and take on a bit of a challenge. As a result, I developed an online gallery for my sister’s art using Ruby on Rails. You can check it out at nayabei.com. My initial application was based on Geoffrey Grosenbach’s gullery app. I customized it quite a bit such as making it accept more fields to describe each piece of art and rerouting. This was my first encounter with MVC and this is my web framework of choice since then. -
Indiana Public Media WordPress Tools
IPM WordPress Slideshow Plugin
As part of my work for Indiana Public Media at Indiana University, I startated a Google-code project containing the different custom WordPress tools we used such as a calendar plug-in, sideshow manager plug-in and a music playlist plug in, . As the description says:
“This is a collection of WordPress MU plugins developed by Indiana Public Media. Many serve purposes that are particular to public broadcasting, arts or news, while others are general site improvements that may be useful to those operating any sort of WordPress MU site.”
If you’d like to use some of these tools or want to join the initiative, see the project page at http://code.google.com/p/ipm-wordpress/.
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SpotAlign: Probabilistic Sound Alignment using Audio Mosaicing
Today’s video game industry has seen more and more interest in bringing interactive music
applications, such as the Guitar Hero® games, to the general public. While karaoke has been
around for a long time, it has not evolved to include modern sound processing technologies.
This report presents initial work on a voicesubstitution karaoke system, SpotAlign. SpotAlign
takes an user’s voice as input to intelligently reconstruct a preexisting voice track, most likely
the original singer’s, so that it sounds like the preexisting track, but maintaining much of the
interpretation of the user (tempo and volume). Using Michael Casey’s mosaicing system
Soundspotter as a starting point, an audiotoaudio alignment algorithm was developed and
implemented. To my knowledge, this system is unique in its inclusion of features from both
audio mosaicing and audiotoaudio alignment, allowing the user to interpolate the effect
between these two techniques. Download PDF.
Example
Say we have a voice-only pre-recorded track of a famous singer (easy for a music label): 
Carlos Varela – Una Palabra (excerpt) 
Now, we sing into our system the following input(don’t mind my purposelly quirky singing): Pablo’s version of Una Palabra Note the different tempo and out of tuneness. 
Our system would spit back the following, in real time: Combined input and output(right channel is input, left channel is output) Get SpotAlign
SpotAlign is a patch and an external binary written for the
graphical DSP language, PureData (Pd). The external uses flext, “a C++ layer for cross platform development of Pd and Max/MSP objects“. Before you open the Pd patch, first you must use flext to compile the source code for your platform (Windows, MacOS, or Linux).The binary for Linux will also be included with the source.
The code is linked against the fftw3 and libsndfile
libraries, so you will need these installed.
About me
I live in Denver, Colorado and work as a contractor for HAIKU Learning Systems, Inc., an online learning company. I did my Master's in Music Informatics at Indiana University and got a B.A. in Computer Science and Mathematics, with a minor in Music from Carroll College in Helena, Montana.
