• dannenberg@cmu.edu

Roger B. Dannenberg, Associate Research Professor of Computer Science and Art is also a fellow of the Studio for Creative Inquiry. Dannenberg is well known for his computer music research, including the Audacity Audio Editor, programming language design, and real-time interactive systems. In the language area, his chief contribution is the use of functional programming concepts to describe real-time behavior, an approach that forms the foundation for Nyquist, a widely used sound synthesis language. His pioneering work in computer accompaniment led to three patents and the SmartMusic system now used by over one hundred thousand music students. He also played a central role in the development of the Piano Tutor, an intelligent, interactive, automated multimedia tutor that enables a student to obtain first-year piano proficiency in less than 20 hours. As a composer, Dannenberg’s compositions have been performed by the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, the Pittsburgh Symphony, and many festivals. As a trumpet player, he has collaborated with musicians including Anthony Braxton, Eric Kloss, and Roger Humphries, and performed in concert halls ranging from the historic Apollo Theater in Harlem to the Espace de Projection at IRCAM. Dannenberg is active in performing jazz, classical, and new works. Dannenberg is the only person on this page to have performed on MTV.

• randall@andrew.cmu.edu

Richard Randall earned a BM in Theoretical Studies (with Distinction in Performance) from New England Conservatory of Music, an MA in Music Theory from Queens College of the City University of New York, and a PhD from University of Rochester, Eastman School of Music. 

Randall's research ranges from music perception and cognition, mathematical modeling, philosophy of music theory, Schenkerian analysis, style analysis, and twentieth-century music analysis. He has presented papers at conferences for the Society for Music Theory, the Music Theory Society of New York State, American Mathematical Society, International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, and the Society for Music Perception and Cognition. Recent publications include "Similarity Measures for Tonal Models" (2006) and "Lerdahl's Tonal Pitch Space Model and Associated Metric Spaces" (2010).

He is a fellow at the Studio for Creative Inquiry and has a faculty appointment at the Center for the Neural Basis for Cognition. His research is supported by a Berkman Faculty Development Grant and a Rothberg Brain Imaging Award. Prior to his appointment at Carnegie Mellon, Randall held teaching posts at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and Tufts University. 

• rs6k@andrew.cmu.edu

Riccardo Schulz is Associate Teaching Professor in the School of Music at Carnegie Mellon, where he teaches Sound Recording and runs the recording operations. His special interest is in recording, editing, and mastering classical music. For three years he was head of the Edgar Stanton Audio Recording Institute (ESARI) for the summer program of the Aspen Music Festival and School. 

Riccardo has recorded and/or produced more than a hundred compact discs on a variety of record labels, including Élan, New Albion, Mode Records, Ocean Records, Norvard, and New World Records. He has also recorded and/or mastered CDs of world music, jazz, alternative rock groups, and selected hip-hop artists. Groups and individuals he has collaborated with include Cuarteto Latinoamericano, Andrés Cárdenes and Luz Manríquez; conductors Denis Colwell and the River City Brass Band, Keith Lockhart and the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra, Eduardo Alonso-Crespo and the Tucumán Chamber Orchestra, Rachael Worby and the Wheeling Symphony Orchestra, Juan Pablo Izquierdo and the Carnegie Mellon Philharmonic, Robert Page and the Mendelssohn Choir; Andrés Cárdenes and the Pittsburgh Symnphony Chamber Orchestra; Chatham Baroque; pianists Laura Opedisano, Aki Takahashi, and Barbara Nissman; santur player Dariush Saghafi; guitarist Manuel Barrueco, composers Iannis Xenakis, Reza Vali, Nancy Galbraith, David Stock, Ricardo Lorenz, Julián Orbón, and Leonardo Balada; mezzo-soprano Vivica Genaux; baritone Sebastian Catana; tenor Arturo Martín.

Riccardo’s recording of Inca Dances by Gabriela Lena Frank and featuring Cuarteto Latinoamericano and guitarist Manuel Barrueco, received a Latin GRAMMY Award in 2009 for Best Classical Contemporary Compostion.

Riccardo’s non-classical recording credits include the rock group The Syndeys and The Glass Cube; hip-hop artists Freestyle, Unknown Prose, Lil ’Toine, E-Nyse, Charon Don and D. J. Huggy; and jazz artists Alton Merrell, Nathan Davis, Roger Humphries, Bobby Negri, Dave Pellow, James Johnson Jr, and others.

Riccardo has co-produced CDs with Carnegie Mellon students Steven Goldberg, Anna Vogelzang, Tate Olsen, Michael Kooman, Jeffrey Grossman, Ali Spagnola, Ariel Winters, Friedrich Myers, Justin Bishop, Greg Runco, Andy Jih, Haseeb Qureshi, Gabriel Cuthbert, Derek Pendergrass, Joshua Hailpern, Fumiya Yamamoto, Enoma Oviasu, John O’Hallaron, and others. He also oversees recordings with participants in the Arts Greenhouse project, a community-oriented hip-hop workshop for teenagers.

Riccardo also edits and masters the full season of Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra performances in conjunction with WQED-FM for local and national radio broadcast, and is in his twenty-third year of recording and editing performances of the Pittsburgh Opera for radio broadcast.

With Carnegie Mellon alumnus Alex Geis, Riccardo has developed the Webcast project and the Destination website for the Carnegie Mellon School of Music, the first music conservatory in the world to offer live Internet broadcast of student recitals and ensemble concerts.

Riccardo has master's degrees in mathematics from Duquesne University and musicology from the University of Pittsburgh. He speaks Italian, and for several years was assistant accompanist for singers with the EPCASO program in Oderzo, Italy. He is former program annotator for the Y-Music Series, and former music critic for WQED-FM's Sunday Arts Magazine. 

Riccardo lives happily in Pittsburgh without a cellphone or a television, and has been a vegetarian for longer than anyone can remember.

• rms@ece.cmu.edu

Most current speech recognition systems do not yet perform well in difficult acoustical environments, or in different environments from the ones in which they had been trained. This research is concerned with improving the robustness of SPHINX, Carnegie Mellons large-vocabulary continuous-speech recognition system, with respect to acoustical distortion resulting from sources such as background noise, competing talkers, change of microphone, and room reverberation. Several different strategies are being used to address these problems. These include: improved noise cancellation and speech normalization methods, the use of representations of the speech waveform that are based on the processing of sounds by the human auditory system, and the use of array-processing techniques to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the speech that is input to the system.
Signal Processing in the Auditory System

This research includes both psychoacoustical measurements to determine how we hear complex sounds, and the development of mathematical models that use optimal communication theory to relate the results of these experiments to the neural coding of sounds by the auditory system. Much of this work has been concerned with the localization of sound and other aspects of binaural perception.

• tms@ece.cmu.edu

Research Interests

Though there is currently no funded research at CMU in this area, Dr. Sullivan's interests lie in the areas of signal processing for audio and music systems.

Audio Signal Processing

As the professional recording industry has grown, so has the complexity and quality of sound recording equipment. Research in audio signal processing serves the advancement of digital audio recording. From the need for lossless data compression, to higher quality filtering for A/D and D/A conversion, to better error correction coding for digital hard disk and magnetic tape systems (and compact discs), the research areas where electrical engineers can aid the entertainment industry are great.
Music Signal Processing

Signals from musical instruments are very complex waveforms. As the professional recording and performance industries demand higher quality synthesis of existing musical instruments, the study of new methods of instrument synthesis has increasing importance. In addition, the greater quality of films and television have increased the need for more realistic generation of sound effects. The use of digital sampling in the creation of music and sound effects merges the music and professional audio signal processing areas.

In addition, there is increasing desire for the control of music synthesizers by other existing musical instruments and new, non-standard "instruments" or "controllers". Pitch and expressive tracking of these instruments are vital to obtaining information from a performer that is capable of giving the performer high-level control over a music synthesizer.