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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."
"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." There is? Since when?
Bored? Why not join a decent mess
I knew and interacted with Michael Hawley lightly for a year (temporary advisor at MIT).
From my experience, he was constantly chasing whatever research line was most likely to get him in the media while neglecting projects that seemed to have more research merit but less potential for media attention.
I always thought it would be interesting for someone to devise an "instrument" out of the QWERTY keyboard. So many people are proficient with the standard keyboard they'd be instant musicians.
It would be a cool addition to MMORPG games where you can have real bards that actually play music via keyboard.
I disagreed with the article quote that "For [Hawley], there is 'no difference between an ivory keyboard and a QWERTY keyboard'."I think the key will be to recognize that electronic music and the more classical type both have their own qualities and complement, rather than replace, each other. Sort of like how electric, acoustic, and classical guitars are all similar instruments but each have their own sound -- none is meant to replicate any other one.
I used to host IRC Chat for Bhutan before we got DDoSed to death. Really nice people, some egg heads too. Aside from the "Wanna chat?" guys asking for 16 year old girls, it's a nice place with alot of smart people.
Sig: I stole this sig.
Actually I recall that at some point people did do debugging by 'listening', to the code (I may mistake this, and I could be thinking about hardware) - the idea being that good code sounds distinctly different to bad code.
Actually thinking about it, it would be a rather good method of debugging - if one could find a way to transform code into something melodic, and making the giant assumption that 'bad code', would produce a dischord or something similar...
And elegance is an excellent way to think about programming I find - much like the way there's elegance in much of science and mathematics: E=M(C*C) being the most obvious example.
fortune -o
More rich individuals?, being a rich individual is measured in terms of how well you addapt to the social roles that are impossed nowdays?.
Slashdot is a social activity.
Please think about this: Name 1 comunity of non-geek persons that are more than 10 and that get together every day to discuss their ideas. There are NONE.
Now, look at Slashdot, are we unsocial terminal geeks?.
I Think the hole think is upside down. We are social people, actually more sociable than other social groups because we still belevie in some things like netiquete, we can maintain social contract. Actual society CAN'T. Slashdot is not a website, it's a social contract. EVERYONE can post here, and he will be listened, we have our methods to protect ourselves from those that don't know how to live in society, but we won't censor them or ask them to go away.
We are unsocial with many people because they comunicate in a different language, which is by definition aggresive and antisocial.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
And I was right, sorry to reply to my own comment, but here is a link to the new scientist article on debugging by ear.
fortune -o
I've written an embedded firmware program for the Atmel AVR microcontroller to use the PS2 keyboard as a MIDI music keyboard. It's on Avrfreaks.com in the projects directory (search under MIDI).
Interfacing the PC keyboard is really tricky. It was necessary to use all the Warnier-Orr diagramming techniques learned in school to map out what was happening in order to get totally lost in the coding. But it does work. Press several keys down and get a chord on the synthesizer; release the keys and the notes go silent.
The real problem with using the PS2 QWERTY keyboard as a music keyboard is that certian key combinations don't work. I suspect that this is due to the scanning algorythm of the processor inside the PS2 keyboard itself. In business keyboard office applications, people don't press four or five letter keys at the same time.
Still it is a really cheap and small way to get sounds out of a MIDI tone module. This is great for using small, but beautiful sounding synthesizers (like the Roland Sound Canvas, the Yamaha TG100, or the Boss DS-330) in impromptu music sessions that usually have only acoustic guitars and/or drums and flutes or harmonicas. Use a small synth, a PS2 keyboard, a boom box, and a microcontroller PS2-to-MIDI interface to add hundreds of instrument sounds to pick-up jam sessions (ever played music in a deserted McDonald's at 9 pm?). The whole set up is light and tranportable (and cheap if it gets confiscated by the police or stolen).
Dare to be weird, strive to be stupid!
New century, new technology, new solutions!
I made a post while back on the subject of 'musical' passwords. As a pianist and drummer I have developed an interesting technique to use very long complicated passwords and enter them very quickly. They have the property that they are deformable shapes, in space and sequence/time, very like melodic phrases. I enter these on a normal ascii keyboard, thus:
t u
ijihijhijihijhi
popipoipopipoip
uyutuytuyutuy
All these are the same passwd transposed,
thats 3 in less than a second (not checked them for accuracy) You can get VERY quick at it and use secure passwords with great accuracy. The security comes from the sequence length not the diversity, I use 3 fingers, a better pianist/typist would use more.
They have another interesting property.
I can 'not know' the password and be able to enter it, if you ask me what it is I cant tell you. I have to sit at the keyboard and retreive the motor sequence to type it, then I can read it back and tell you.
As someone who has been typing for about thirty years, and playing the piano (for some loose definition of 'playing') for about two years, I have to say that I think my typing habits interfere with my playing.
Specifically, I don't type in tempo, but I have to play in tempo, and I find this extremely hard -- I always want to play ahead on the easy passages, and slow down on the harder ones. Plus, I'd kill for a backspace on the piano.
Ultimately, my playing's only ever much use in short bursts, and I basically use the computer to play things back properly.
I prefer singing and playing violin anyway -- I think the completely different mode of physical interaction with the violin from a keyboard makes the violin much easier for me to handle, since there's no danger of habits from using one showing up in the use of the other. (And I think the violin and the voice are much more interesting musical instruments than the piano.)
I've worked there (3 summer internships) and yes, they're flashy (very much so in 2001, far less so today) but the science and theory is exceedingly interesting met this fellow once... seemed nice enough... if a little obssessed
Ahh, yes but one programmers representation of an orderly set of bytes to accomplish a task can be quite different from another programmers set of bytes that accomplish the same task. What if the end result is not the art? What if the art is in the creation and representation of what creates the end result?
So, even though in the end you ARE bound by a structure of some sort I think that creative thought processes lead to better representations of said orderly structure (code). It most definitely is NOT a traditional form of art, but when I sit down and look a particularly well written function that is simple and "elegant" it inspires me in a great way. Almost the same way as when I see a great photograph that has several complex "artistic" elements involved (IE: Not just a snapshot, a serious well done picture meant to cause you to think).
Since I also enjoy photography and auto mechanics quite a bit I see parallels in ways most people would just discard. Photography is closer to "traditional" art. And I feel inspired the same way when I see a great photograph. Or when I see someone who is doing serious non factory work on their 800hp car and they come up with an "out of the box" solution. Or when I see someone lay some code out so well and so ingeniously that I think, "how would you do it any other way?". It is all inspiring at some level.
So what this boils down to is that art is in the eye of the beholder, truly. Just because it is not traditional art does not mean it isn't art to others. I look at some paintings considered masterpieces, even with the prerequisite knowledge on why this picture is great and have a hard time accepting the creative genius in certain aspects of a painting. The creative genius in a well done piece of code seems much more obvious to me, thus much more artful.
Its all a matter of perspective, as so much is in life.
Jeremy
Media portrayal is extremely important for the development of new talent. I think a lot of young people, especially young women, are turned off from the sciences and other technical fields because of misconstrued ideas of what the respective work enviornment is like.
Personally, if I didn't fall into the sciences by chance, and had to choose a discipline by wading through the different offerings, I might have been discouraged from physics. Who wants to spend their days around reclusive wierdos who are so engaged in their work that they have little interest or time for social activities?
You latter learn that this is (mostly) false, but sometimes that knowledge requires actually getting involved in the discipline. Maybe SesameStreet should introduce Bob, the CS swinger. :)
You definetly make a lot of excellent points here -- and it is a matter of personal perspective.
:)
I guess a big part of this for me is that people who have the innovative instincts required to write the elegant code we're talking about sometimes confuse that with creativity in its most narrow definition -- fostering the creation of something new. Solving problems on the computer can lead to creative ends through innovation.
The code that I write on my signal processing software is ultimately used as a tool for the creation of electroacoustic music. Lots of this kind of music is all about the process used to create it, similar to what you talk about above. I take issue with that a lot of times, I don't think art should be about the process, especially when "normal" people (i.e. non EA-musicians, non-programmers, etc) find your music completely foreign... this is a huge problem for us.
I think the folks at the Media Lab, while they are smart, are primarily innovators -- they do work on things which will get them media attention. The things they come up with barely touch upon the issues that affect me as a computer geek and composer. I'm sure Dr. Hawley is an interesting person, but a lot of the stuff mentioned above is completely unrelated to what I do every day -- and his compositions probably have little to do with what's going on on the contemporary music scene. It just has a nice "wow" factor.
The futurists also upset a lot of traditional academic musicians, but that's a whole other story
I tend to agree about the "clunkiness" of existing computer interfaces..Creating interfaces in a more natural, "musical" sense would have far-reaching effects in universal understanding not just between man and machine, but between people with different cultures/languages/backgrounds..Music binds us all together at a basic level, so interfaces based on a "musical" or non-verbal/no-visual level could bridge many gaps.
So a computer keyboard is more like an organ or a harpsichord. ISTR that one of the BBC Micro's Welcome programs was called 'organ', and straightforwardly turned the top two rows of keys into white and black notes. And I wrote similar things myself at various points, recording input music and playing it back or trying to generate a similar-sounding tune using simple probabilities of which notes follow each other.
This kind of thing as a basic programming exercise (pun not intended) seems to have died out these days, mostly because sound programming is no longer as simple as it was, which is a pity. Almost all computers have some kind of beeper. Perhaps some day we'll get back to the level of twenty years ago and be able to say
% perl -MSound 'beep 256, 1'
to play middle C for one second.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Bryan,
I tend to agree with you on that. I am definitely NOT wrapped up in what the media thinks I am, or what society is told by the media I OUGHT to be.
I'm a 31 year old 'computer nerd'. When not at a PC working or gaming, I'm playing the banjo (yeah, a real hip instrument) or knee-boarding (yeah, that old 80s summer time sport) on the lake with my wife (pretty, smart wonderful girls CAN love a geek) and my kids, or in the off lake season, playing soccer.
I'm not making hundreds of dot.com dollars a year, but nor am I putting in the 80-90 hours a week either. But I get a heck of a lot of free time to spend with the family and friends.
If I were the fat slob that the media likes to think that ALL geeks are, I'd be into my first heart bypass and wondering how much longer that ticker was going to hold.
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
So the headline should have read "Former MIT Professor." Or maybe "World's Largest Book." For the record, it's 99% likely that CBS reported him as a "former MIT professor," but I mis-heard (and mis-transcribed) it. Oh well - I'm not sure how this affects the story.
Anyway, you comment that he's "no longer a professor of any sort." While it's true that he's no longer part of the faculty, this press release from December still refers to him as being "of the MIT Media lab" and his homepage is still on their server. So I think your clause "of any sort" is not entirely accurate.
Incidentally, the CBS This Morning piece noted that MIT denied him tenure, but I decided to leave it out of my submission because a) I thought it wasn't really relevant to the point of the story; and b) I didn't want to color the story as an "injustice sympathy" piece.
Another thing...being denied tenure doesn't necessarily indicate inferior merit.
My father runs a state-level professional organization for college professors, so I growing up I got to hear all sorts of wacky stories about professors being denied tenure. True Fact: many professors that do solid research are denied tenure. Reasearch is only a part of the criteria.
For starters, professors are expected to regularly (read: constantly) publish long, dry articles in acadmeic journals for peer review. "Publish or Perish." Given Hawley's diverse interests and apparent passion for working with undergraduate students (always a negative in academia), it wouldn't suprise me if he didn't get around to writing boring research articles as often as he should have.
Furthermore, bullshit politics often plays a BIG factor tenure decisions. As noted, Hawley was popular with his students and had a reputation for "relying on hype and PR" in his work (read: jealous colleagues). From the sound of it, he had the tenure odds stacked against him before he even made it to the hearing.
Of course, my impression from the interview was that it didn't seem like he cared too much about tenure anyway.
BTW - Hawley's PR and hype skills obviously suck - compare with Brian Greene. His research on String Theory has - by his own admission - no practical application and is impossible to conclusively prove. Meanwhile, he has two best-selling books and a PBS mini-series. Take note: that's how it's done.