Ajay Kapur
Ajay Kapur is currently the director of Music Technology at the California Institute of the Arts. He received an Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in 2007 from University of Victoria combining computer science, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, music and psychology with a focus on intelligent music systems and media technology. Ajay graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University in 2002. He has been educated by music technology leaders including Dr. Perry R. Cook, Dr. George Tzanetakis, and Dr. Andrew Schloss, combined with mentorship from robotic musical instrument sculptors Eric Singer and the world famous Trimpin. A musician at heart, trained on drumset, tabla, sitar and other percussion instruments from around the world, Ajay strives to push technological barriers in order to explore new sounds, rhythms and melodies.
John Baffa
John Baffa has been working in the professional live audio business for nearly 20 years and has been a recording engineer for over 12 years. He has toured mixing live sound in venues all over the world, including a recent highlight at the Sydney Opera House in 2010. John has worked with such artists as Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Trio, Johnny Cash, Mike Patton, Henry Rollins, and The Melvins. John is the owner and lead engineer of TV Tray Studio, a full-service recording facility founded in 2003. He has several independent album credits thus far, and has recorded albums for various CalArts faculty members, alumni, and groups, including Vinny Golia, David Johnson, Vicki Ray, David Rosenboom, Plotz, Dr. Mint and the Los Angeles Percussion Quartet. He is currently the Director of Production Technology at the CalArts Herb Alpert School of Music and also teaches recording and audio engineering in the Music Technology (MTIID) program.
Permanent Visiting Lecturers
Perry R. Cook
Perry R. Cook is an American computer music researcher and professor of computer science and music at Princeton University and part-time guest artist at CalArts. He is also the head of the Princeton Sound Lab. Cook has helped to significantly advance the areas of physical modeling, singing voice synthesis, principles of computer music controller design, and also works extensively with audio analysis and real-time computer music programming languages and systems. He (and later with Gary Scavone) authored the Synthesis Toolkit (STK), and authored the ChucK programming language (with Ge Wang). He is also a co-founder, with Dan Trueman, of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk). In 2003 Professor Cook was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and was an invited keynote speaker at NIME-07, held in New York City. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (2008). Cook holds master's and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University, a BSEE from the University of Missouri Engineering School and a bachelor's degree in music from the University of Missouri at Kansas City Conservatory of Music.
Trimpin
Trimpin, a sound sculptor, composer and inventor, is one of the most stimulating one-man forces in music today. A specialist in interfacing computers with traditional acoustic instruments, he has developed a myriad of methods for playing, trombones, cymbals, pianos, and so forth with Macintosh computers. Trimpin now resides in Seattle where numerous instruments that defy description adorn his amazing studio. In describing his work, Trimpin sums it up as "extending the traditional boundaries of instruments and the sounds they're capable of producing by mechanically operating them. Although they're computer-driven, they're still real instruments making real sounds, but with another dimension added, that of spatial distribution. What I'm trying to do is go beyond human physical limitations to play instruments in such a way that no matter how complex the composition of the timing, it can be pushed over the limits."