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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
"with much more to their lives than hardware upgrades, programming languages and pocket protectors" Lies! There cannot be anything more to life!
For what it's worth, I'm a computer nerd and I could not care less how the mass media portrays me. Why should I? Why do you?
I've always considered coding to be an artistic pursuit - the perfect form, in coding's case, is the elegant form IMHO - the creation of the simplest tool to do the job well (and fulfill the requirements spec, of course :-). In music, the art is the whole expression: the rise and fall in volume, the tempo changes, the different instruments, the silences, the mood-creation. Music is the pursuit of immersion. Coding is the pursuit of elegance. At least for me.
:-)
:-)
On the other hand, I can't really see "Spreadsheet in D minor" becoming too popular... entering incrementing data by performing a crescendo on the keyboard will take a while to catch on
So whereas there are similarities, I think there are differences too, and I think the two input mechanisms reflect that. There is the other point that not all of us are maestro's with a musical instrument... the user-interface of the ivories might be slightly less user-friendly than the traditional QWERTY (or AZERTY, or whatever is your poison
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
"For him, there is 'no difference between an ivory keyboard and a QWERTY keyboard.'"
I don't know if I want to read his book.
I imagine something like...
akldsfjasjgl;aghjaklgfajgsafjklaa;fsadh
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.
This has to be one of the few that has the opposite problem.
Most nerds are men, and men change their priorities and attitudes over time. My rule of thumb is that the jocks mature early, the nerds mature late.
A nerd invests hugely in a technical subject and should, with time, be able to leverage that into a high value career. So it's quite normal that many men who were totally nerdy in their teens and twenties become relaxed, charming, social, and wealthy as they get older and more succesful.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
See Prodikeys.
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 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.
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?
I have a platinum-plated pocket protector of +5 charisma!
End of Line.
Both people have some extra money to do something to impress their friends. Hawley has more money.
BTW, why did the guy who mentioned big book/small country get modded troll?
OK, OK, so the giant book is an exercise in making some kind of maximum display technology like a middle ages style plasma TV. The big story here is enlarging the images to an appropriate resolution.
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. (Wilde)
Sorry, I was upgrading the embedded Forth interpreter in my pocket protector. What was it you wanted?
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!
People who want to do music ... and I'm IT staff, who is getting a statistics degree, yet writes classical music as a hobby for fun ... find that they are stymied by antiquated and just plain dumb music software.
... oh, never heard of Banyan? Think on it.
The Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) is twenty+plus years old. Imagine if you were trying to do your networking using Banyan
Yet MIDI is what someone who WRITES music must use to export notes over into a program that will PLAY the music they write (i.e. a sequencer) with any degree of real sound. By itself, MIDI just does not support the nuances and articulations of music desk-top publishing, the environments known as notation programs. And also, notation programs can't adequately play back the notes (the sound is cheesey at best).
So people, myself included, resort to composing in one or the other, or perhaps in both a sequencer and a notation program simultaneously, each program running on a separate machine! Is that stone-age or what!!! Imagine if that was what was required to do word processing!
With the current state of MIDI, the computer isn't even able to write what you play into it from a keyboard (without hours and hours of tweaking and guesstimation). We haven't even come that far, people!
Oh, did I mention that the special cables and splitters required to network MIDI devices together are about 2000% more expensive than any other cable connections you are likely to buy! $600.00 all told to hook up three PCs with a MIDI keyboard!!! This is true of Macs as well as PCs.
No, computers AREN'T music friendly and it is a needless shame. Something must be done about it.
So this guy comes out with a book that is seven feet tall, weighs 133 pounds, and costs $10,000. This is an achievement of sorts, but as Molly Ivins once pointed out, once you've seen a one-ton cheese, a two-ton cheese isn't that impressive.
Again why should I care about a *ANY* girl (pretty or not) which get her idea from the media, and is completly close-minded to recognize that *I* am different than how the media portray me ? Why should I care about about any girl which judge on the outside apparence and media portraying and do not bother revisionning it when she meets me ? Is such girl even worth bothering, if she can't make her own opinion different than what the media sprout ?
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
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
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.
Musical computing is what I do now, at this place, and it's definitely true that computers are not musical enough.
First, the computer is theoretically a completely general tool, but the ones we use come packaged as an office tool. Using them for other purposes generally requires alot of work against this, even in our favorite operating systems. (though FAR less so)
The next problem is computer hardware. It's quite a daunting task in most cases to connect a keyboard or other controller to a computer. It has to be easy for non-geeks. (USB makes this much better than it has been.) In addition, the vast majority of low-end keyboards are awful. They usually have undersize keys, and almost never have velocity, which both become a problem once you move beyond 'mary had a little lamb'.
Creative makes a keyboard that is integrated into the qwerty keyboard. I think this is a fantastic idea. However, the same problems apply, undersize keys (they can be shorter, but they must be wide enough) proprietary, or at least nonstandard drivers, and very cheap construction. It is basically unusable, if they're wondering why it's not selling. Great idea though.
It is a travesty that all 'toy' musical instruments for children are really unplayable. What are we doing to our kids! Even the adult ones under $300 all lack velocity, and often have cheap keys that 'bounce.'
Using the qwerty keyboard as an instrument is not a bad idea. It is fundamentally different from typing. As an adult student of piano I thought my keyboard use as a geek would help. Maybe a little, but one key difference is that key hits when typing are INTERLEAVED, hence we get letters in order. Musical key hits are SYNCRONIZED, you often hit several keys at once. Learning the difference can be tough at first.
It does allow monoponic (one sound at a time) playing, and for that it's pretty neat. Many synth packages already do this, but the feature's not intended to be useful outside of testing. The PC keyboard sends key down and key up messages, so it may be possible to have polyphony (multiple sounds at once and chords) on keyboards whose internal multiplexing doesn't prevent it. Libraries intended for text keyboard use won't work for this.
Learning the piano I also realize that all those hours mastering Bruce Lee on the c64 when I was 13 were exactly the time when my brain could have been mastering music. The idea that you can't learn later is a myth. You learn differently. But the willingness, and the ability, to sit there for 6 to 8 hours a day trying to master something happens when you're young. (Luckily I did this with electronics and computers, so I'm now employed!)
Computers make GREAT musical instruments, and allow music to be made in most of the old ways and many completely new ways. Of course it's up to the musician to use them to make GOOD music.
The computer and toy industries have to start making products that are really useful to normally skilled people in normal situations, which are neither too technical or so stripped down as to be useless. Also, there need to be more musical games, which teach fundamentals, and are also fun. The only reason why the techological revolution isn't also a musical one is that we just haven't bothered. There's an instrument in every home and classroom now, and if we aren't cheap and lazy about it, they would be useful.
God himself is well known for playing the pipe organ. RMS has (unfortunately) been known to sing (I can't find a link to this gem, it used to be somewhere on Jamie Zawinski's website.) Eric Raymond advises hacker wannabes to master a musical instrument to enrich their personality.
It's old news...hackers like music. Why? Music is a cleverly woven chain of simple notes and chords, and if you do it right it sounds amazing and gives much of the same gratification as programming.
That said, this guy's pretty damn cool.
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
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.