The Bregman Electronic Music Studio at Dartmouth College
Eric Lyon
Music Department, HB6187t
Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH 03755
USA
Email:
[email protected]
1. INTRODUCTION
The Bregman Electronic Music Studio at Dartmouth College is the dedicated to the composition, performance and
production of electro-acoustic music, and related research.
The faculty includes Jon Appleton, Charles Dodge, Kui
Dong, Eric Lyon, Larry Polansky (Music), Jamshed
Baruched (Psychology), Charles Sullivan (Engineering)
and Mary Roberts (Research associate).
The cornerstone is the graduate program leading to a Master of Arts degree in Electro-Acoustic Music - a two-year
interdisciplinary program combining the study of electroacoustic music composition with studies in areas such as
digital signal processing, electrical engineering, computer
science, acoustics, psycho-acoustics and cognition.
The program also serves the needs of Dartmouth undergraduates through undergraduate classes in electro-acoustic
music and full studio access for qualified students. Many
undergraduates undertake independent study with Bregman
faculty for specific electro-acoustic research and composition projects.
The studio regularly invites distinguished artists and
researchers for concerts, lectures and research projects. The
faculty, guest researchers and artists, graduate students and
undergraduates work closely together in a tight-knit community, often collaborating on musical performance,
research or software development projects.
2. HISTORY
The Bregman Studio was begun in 1967 by Jon Appleton
with a gift from Gerald Bregman '54, built around a Moog
synthesizer and tape recording technology available at the
time. In 1974 the Bregman Electronic Music Studio moved
to Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering to support a
joint project in digital synthesis between Professor Appleton and Thayer research associate Sydney Alonso (and
later undergraduate Cameron Jones) which became the
Synclavier - the first commercially available portable digital synthesizer. In 1980 the studio moved to its current
home in Hallgarten as part of the Hopkins Arts Center,
shortly after the graduate program was inaugurated.
3. THE GRADUATE PROGRAM
The Electro-Acoustic Music program is small and intense.
All students develop their skills at both electro-acoustic
composition and computer programming through a fixed
set of proseminars and coursework. An individual course of
study is devised in consultation with each student to provide any additional technical background required for
thesis work.
The second year is devoted to the masters thesis. This is
most often either a work of art, research or software project,
although in some cases the lines between these categories
are blurred. Play!: An Exploration of Game Music by
recent graduate Jonathan Rayback is an original piece of
Java software - an interactive, evolving artwork which is
based on a philosophical inquiry into the overlap between
games and art. Recent trends we have observed in thesis
work include timbre research, and Web-based interactive
artworks.
Graduates of the program have moved into many related
areas: some have continued to work as composers and performers, some have started their own music software
companies or worked with music related hardware and software projects in the computer industry. It is not the aim of
the program to educate future academics, although all of
our graduates are fully qualified to teach computer music.
4. THE STUDIO
The technological basis for most of the work at Bregman is
computers. The studio maintains the fastest available Macintosh computers and Intel PCs running Linux, Windows
and BeOS. Most research, development and composition is
done with programming languages C, C++, Perl and Java,
and core signal processing languages Csound, Matlab,
Max/MSP, and SuperCollider. Peripherals are acquired as
