Slashdot Mirror
MIT Professor Michael Hawley
cyranoVR writes "Today's CBS This Morning ran an interesting profile on MIT Professor Michael Hawley. Aside from recently publishing a super-jumbo-sized book about the Kingdom of Bhutan, he has invented (among other things) an interactive kitchen counter, designed a heart monitor embedded in jewelry, contributed to the MIT Toys of Tomorrow project and has written several classical compositions for piano. What really struck me was Hawley's observation that 'today's computers aren't musical enough.' For him, there is 'no difference between an ivory keyboard and a QWERTY keyboard.' I think it's a good thing that the mainstream media is starting to show how 'computer nerds' (as the correspondent identified Hawley) can be rich individuals with much more to their lives than hardware upgrades, programming languages and pocket protectors."
See Prodikeys.
Throwing a box in the microwave isn't cooking. Similarily, hitting keys on your keyboard isn't making music.
I really have nothing against the idea, but if your only exposure to an instrument is a keyboard and various samples, the end result might not be terribly interesting. But neither is microwaved food.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -Voltaire
Except that in the case of what I observed, Prof. Hawley would literally drop an in-progress project the moment the media buzz died down.
This is different from popular researchers such as Carl Sagan and Steven Hawking, who routinely give/gave simplified glimpses of their research to the public, but certainly haven't driven their research based on how much media exposure it's likely to generate.
Check his background, CBS and Slashdot. Hawley didn't get tenure because he didn't do much solid research (instead relying on hype and PR). He's no longer a professor at MIT of any sort.
He seems neither unpublished nor unaware. He won the Van Cliburn piano competition and has performed concerts around the world including symphony hall in Boston. His journal publications in computer music listed on his CV include "Windows for Unix at Lucasfilm," (USENIX 1985); "MIDI Music Software for Unix" (USENIX 1986); "Porting UNIX to the Bosendorfer" (Computer Graphics Workshop, 1986); "The Personal Orchestra" (Computing Systems Journal, 3(2), 1990; "Structure out of Sound" (1993). I see from his bio that he did work at IRCAM and at Lucasfilm, both helping to pioneer the digital audio field. That looks like early work, so he probably moved on intellectually but kept up the piano chops.
Perhaps you should crawl out from under your own little rock and ask him yourself instead of whining about what you don't know. His web page and email address are public information.
I had never seen "slashdot" (and also haven't seen the CBS piece that spawned the rapidly devolving commentary.) Incidentally, I agreed somewhat sheepishly to allow the CBS piece as well as a profile in DISCOVER magazine because I was happy to share some of my views on teaching, and learning, and exploration to get out. These things are rather apart from many of the cracks made, which leads me to think that I'm not the only one who didn't see the CBS piece. Or maybe that's just the ordinary kind of "slashing" at play in slashdot.
Anyway, a few thoughts from afar.
1. Big Bhutan Book.
http://www.friendlyplanet.org/bhutan
This is an unusual coming together of notions. Technically we sought to advance, a little bit, the tools for field photography. I think we helped do this. We did assemble in passing what appears to be the world's largest archive of imagery from Bhutan (both film scans at grain resolution and digital), the bulk of it stamped with GPS information, etc. But we also wanted to help the students and schools there. That's why we engaged young Bhutanese students to take photos with us on several expeditions. And it's why we needed a publishing model that would generate some revenue (traditional ones don't). If unbound and hung in a gallery, the big book would need 500 horizontal feet of wall space, and cost a good $2500 to frame every 5x7 foot spread. As it stands, the book works out to less than $100 per page, and when a donor makes a $10k gift to the nonprofit charity established for this purpose (Friendly Planet), nearly $8k can be realized in profits (ie, deduction for the donor, and proceeds to benefit the schools). This is partly due to the outstanding help we've had from Amazon, HP, FedEx, and many others, and the incredible book binding work done by Acme (the world's oldest bindery). And because the prints are so large, we had to get really good at scrubbing grain noise from the film imagery and CCD noise from the high-ISO digital pictures. These and a number of other little technical twists helped add up to a nice result. Later in the spring we will introduce a more reasonably sized book, fine art prints, and begin work on Cambodia (our next subject). One step at a time.
2. Music and Audio Technology.
I worked for a long time at Bell Labs, IRCAM and Lucasfilm, so have been pushing on music and advancing the field of digital audio systems for quite awhile. Most of my early published journal articles were in this vein and can be found, e.g., in Usenix proceedings and journals from the late 80's. My MIT graduate work was also on audio analysis (e.g., how can a computer be architected in order to listen to something as rich and complex as a film soundtrack and pull out interesting information from the auditory scene?) The dissertation (Structure out of Sound, 1993) is available from the MIT Library. Project work ranged from scanning of crumbling Duo-Art player piano rolls, interfacing to a solenoid-driven Bosendorfer concert grand, high quality synthesis of a lifetime of human speech, to suites of MIDI and other audio tools. Much of this is now late bronze-age work, but some of the ideas and methods live on. I remain interested in the field, but am not actively plowing it.
3. Teaching, Learning, Research and Tenure.
A number of writers seem confused (or naive) about this. (Needless to say, nobody troubled to ask me.)
The main reason I have been somewhat distant from MIT of late (I turned down an endowed chair, became Director of Special Projects, and now maintain a more relaxed affiliation with the Media Laboratory) is that my interests were moving more towards nonprofit work with schools in developing countries. And I was also enjoying some nice personal success in music, which requires a tremendous amount of "solo" time. One just cannot spend that amount of time out of the lab, or practicing, and maintain a normal rank staff post in Cambridge. And