About
MISSION
ABOUT CNMAT:
The Center for New Music and Associated Technologies (CNMAT) houses a dynamic group of educational, performance, and research programs focused on multidisciplinary research and the creative use of sound. CNMAT combines technical and science-based research with a humanistic critical-making perspective that focus on practical investigations into new music creation, sound, and data applications for music. The Center merges the laboratory and the stage to extend the boundaries of present-day music-making.
CNMAT invites diverse communities of composers, artists, researchers, engineers, scientists, faculty, students, staff, and the public to participate in the activities at the center. Our legacy, emerging digital tools, and publications are freely shared with composers, musicians, and researchers throughout the world. CNMAT produces numerous concerts, lectures, and symposia open to the public. The ECO Ensemble, a leading Bay Area new music ensemble is in permanent residence at the CNMAT.
CNMAT partners closely with the Department of Music and provides free and open software that fuels the current undergraduate music and technology curriculum. CNMAT further collaborates with several affiliate departments, presenters, and units on campus, including the Department of Art Practice, the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, the Department of Film and Media, the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation, the College of Environmental Design, the Arts Research Center, the School of Information, the Townsend Center for the Humanities, the Berkeley Institute of Design, Berkeley Arts and Design, the Berkeley Center for New Media, BAM/PFA, Cal Performances, and the Magness Collection of Jewish Art and Life. In 2024, CNMAT initiated a new program in Undergraduate Research that invites students who have completed several courses to join in active research at CNMAT.
Since accepting the Directorship of CNMAT in 2014, Professor Campion has focused on inclusion and the broadening of relationships between people, machines, and all the arts. Regarding the general working model at CNMAT Professor Campion explains, “We explore and create emerging technologies in parallel with the creation and performance of new music. This approach reveals technical issues and new ways of thinking about technology in direct relation to music-making. Concurrently, Professor Carmine Cella, a composer, and mathematician, oversees music sciences at CNMAT as the Lead Researcher, facilitating science-oriented research endeavors and assisting in the publication of technical research papers. The results are always shared on GitHub or in the Max Packages Manager. Recent advances include the visual metronome by the Technical Director at CNMAT, Jeremy Wagner.”
CNMAT AND THE MUSIC COMPOSITION PROGRAM IN THE DEPARTMENT OF MUSIC:
The Center for New Music and Audio Technology (CNMAT) is structured as an interdisciplinary research center affiliated with the Music Department and closely aligned with the music composition program. It includes faculty from the music department, staff, visiting artists, students, and researchers who collaborate on various projects. The center is co- directed by Edmund Campion and Carmine-Emanuele Cella, and involves contributions from multiple departments and centers, including Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS)and the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM)..
At CNMAT, students, faculty, and visiting scholars can conduct research, produce concerts, attend and host workshops, record and produce new music, or develop DIY invented instruments. The center supports projects that explore innovative music compositional approaches, improvisation, uses of technology in music, human/computer interaction, assisted music composition and orchestration, advanced real time sound transformations, instrument augmentation, spatial audio, and creative computing with machine learning.
CNMAT is equipped with state-of-the-art technology for music creation and research with advanced audio workstations and software for digital signal processing, custom-built hardware for sound synthesis and manipulation, high-quality sound systems for accurate sound reproduction and recording, augmented musical instruments integrated with technology, as well as MIDI controllers and sensors. The Main Room at CNMAT is equipped with a 16-channel Meyer sound system. The professional level Recording Studio, and the DIY hardware lab are maintained at the highest standards of audio and hardware engineering.
During the academic year, CNMAT offers a public concert season, special workshops, symposia, Music Composition colloquia, open labs, and collaborative events that emphasize the diverse range of practitioners in music and research. Graduate students are encouraged to participate in the community through the CNMAT Users Group (CUG). CUG organizes student-led events and research and presents the annual Spring guest ensemble in residence.
CNMAT HISTORY:
The UC Berkeley Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) was conceived and established by composer and Professor Emeritus Richard Felciano in the late 1980s. Professor David Wessel (1942-2014) served as Director of CNMAT from 1988 until 2005 where CNMAT established its international reputation including several hundred juried publications and widely used digital tools and protocols. In 2005.
Adrian Freed served as Research Director from 1989 until 2016 where he organized an ambitious research agenda that produced concrete, practical developments in music-related technologies, including widely adopted innovations such as Open Sound Control (OSC), the Sound Description Interchange Format (SDIF), the CNMAT tools for Max/MSP, and the cross-platform odot programming objects.
Richard Andrews served as Associate Director from 1996 to 2021 where he managed key industrial affiliate relationships including a long-standing partnership with Gibson Guitar.
In the mid-’90s, the team expanded to include Musical Applications Programmer Matthew Wright, and Professor Edmund Campion was appointed the Co-Director at CNMAT in 2005 and assumed the directorship in 2014. Over the years, CNMAT staff including John MacCallum, Jeff Lubow, and Jeremy Wagner have continued to contribute important and lasting contributions.
In 2018, the Department of Music and CNMAT welcomed Professor Carmine Cella who is now lead for the Music Sciences at CNMAT.
DIRECTORSHIP AND STAFF (2023)
OUTREACH
CNMAT's events program offers a range of concerts, lectures and workshops informed by our research and pedagogical efforts. In our Sound Spatialization Theater, we present concerts that cross cultural and musical barriers and provide a forum for diverse lectures and demonstrations for students, faculty and the community.
PEDAGOGY
CNMAT supports the Department of Music with a full curriculum in Music and Technology based on over twenty-five years of research and development. We also offer an ongoing series of workshops and residencies open to the public. CNMAT does not offer any specific degree program, either undergraduate or graduate, in the area of music and technology -- prospective graduate students apply directly to the music composition program in the Department of Music.
Students interested in joining with research teams at CNMAT begin by taking the course Music 158A or Music 159.
Full list of CNMAT-related courses and descriptions
VISITING SCHOLARS AND RESEARCHERS
CNMAT accepts proposals from visiting scholars, composers, and researchers at any time during the year.
CNMAT INDUSTRIAL AFFILIATES PROGRAM
Industrial and organizational support plays an important role in maintaining
the quality of research at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies
(CNMAT) at the University of California at Berkeley.
LINK TO THE CNMAT INDUSTRIAL AFFILIATES PROGRAM
Address
1750 Arch Street
Berkeley, California
94720
U.S.A.
Phone Number
+1 (510) 643-9990
Coordinates
-122.264213, 37.876795
Administrative Contact
Jeremy Hunt <manager-cnmat(at)berkeley(dot)edu>
Directions to CNMAT: