CLOSE
PRINT
Jonathan Berger, Department Chair, Asssociate Professor, Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, will be the featured speaker at this lecture/discussion series encouraging reflection within the Stanford community on matters of personal values, beliefs, and motivations. Come discover what inspires and really matters to those who help shape the university. All students, faculty, staff and community members are welcome! Feel free to bring your lunch, if you like!
Jonathan Berger is an Associate Professor at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), where he teaches composition and music theory and cognition. He received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and a DMA from Stanford University. Berger is the recipient of four fellowships and commissions from the National Endowment for the Arts and the recipient of numerous prizes and awards including awards from the Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and ASCAP. Berger was the recipient of the Chamber Music America Millennium Commission.
Berger's compositions include works for orchestra, chorus, chamber ensembles, and voice in addition to electro-acoustic music. His research addresses such topics as music analysis, automatic transcription, music cognition, sonification and audio restoration. His compositions are available on the CRI, Neuma, Centaur and Sony Classical labels and his scholarly work has been published by MIT Press, the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, the Journal of Music Theory, and Leonardo.
Echoes of Light and Time, Berger's collaboration with sculptor Dale Chihuly, for a millennium exhibition in the Citadel of David in Jerusalem, has received international recognition. The work incorporates numerous prayers recorded by the composer in Jerusalem and uses light and heat sensors embedded in Chihuly's towering glass sculpture to process and alter these sounds. Excerpts from this sonic sundial have been broadcast throughout Europe and the United States.
Other commissions include Miracles and Mud, a work for the St. Lawrence String Quartet, which will be performed at Stanford in May, Of Hammered Gold, a Chamber Music America Millennium Commission, and a chamber work for Ensemble Kaprizma.
In addition to composition Jonathan Berger is actively involved in research on signal processing and music cognition. His work on denoising (together with CCRMA PhD Charles Nichols and Yale Professor Ronald Coifman) produced a transcription and reconstruction of the historic 1889 cylinder recording of Johannes Brahms playing the piano. This work was featured on NPR s Performance Today and in the New York Times and will soon appear on a CDRom by Yamaha. Berger's book, Musical Expectations, will be published by MIT press next year.