Professor Barry Vercoe
Thursday the 16th of July |
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Opening Keynote Speaker: Professor Barry Vercoe |
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Barry Vercoe is Professor of Music and Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, Boston. He was born and educated in New Zealand, attended Auckland Teachers College and taught in the New Zealand school system, then earned a doctorate in Music Composition at the University of Michigan in the USA. In 1968 at Princeton University he did pioneering work in the field of Digital Audio Processing, then taught at Yale University before joining the MIT faculty in 1971. During the ’70’s and early 80’s he pioneered the composition of works combining computers and live instruments. Then on a Guggenheim Fellowship in Paris in 1983 he developed a Synthetic Performer — a computer that could listen to other performers and play its own part in musical sync, even learning from rehearsals. In 1992 he won the Computer World / Smithsonian Award in Media Arts and Entertainment, in 2004 gained the SEAMUS Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2006 the World Academy of Science Distinguished Achievement Award. |
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In 1985 Professor Vercoe was a founding member of the MIT Media Laboratory, where he has pursued research in Music Cognition and Machine Understanding. His several Music Synthesis languages are used around the world, and a variant of his Csound and NetSound languages has recently been adopted as the core of MPEG-4 audio – an international standard that enables efficient transmission of audio over the internet. Barry is an advisor to the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) initiative with a special interest in education of children of the Pacific. In 2007 he was a keynote for the NZ Government’s Digital Future Summit, and in 2008 served on the Education advisory stream for Australia’s Future Summit. He is currently on leave from MIT to help launch One Laptop per Child in Australia. |
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