Coding music
Professor James Noble from Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Engineering and Computer Science uses software and electronics to create unique musical pieces.
Professor Noble studied computer science at the University. After completing his PhD, he spent some time working in Sydney, mostly as a researcher with a team from Microsoft Research at Macquarie University, before returning to Victoria University of Wellington to take up a post as a lecturer in 1999. During his undergraduate years, Professor Noble started studying music, leading to a part-research-interest, part-hobby of creating music using computer programming.
“I’ve always had an interest in various kinds of music,” Professor Noble says. “I studied a few music papers during my undergraduate degree, and I’ve also been involved in music research projects like working on the design of user interfaces for synthesizers and music software. I’m also really interested in the act or experience of programming, and my take on creating original music is strongly influenced by that.”
Professor Noble has worked on a variety of music projects throughout his career. One project involved writing computer code to make simple dance music, using sorting algorithms to combine melodies. Professor Noble has even performed the results of this project in a variety of different places, ranging from an academic workshop at an art gallery in Stockholm to a “dodgy basement pub” at a music festival in Birmingham.
Other projects have included student-led work on computer programs to create visuals for VJ’s—the kind you might find at a rave, Professor Noble says. He has also worked with fellow musicians, including percussionists Svenda Strom, combining synthesizer programs with the gamelan drums that Svenda plays and performing the results live.
Professor Noble says he enjoys this work because of the contrast it provides with the rest of his research and teaching.
“A lot of my other work is either much more mathematical, much more focussed on programming, or much more focussed on people in their workplaces,” Professor Noble says. “It’s nice to have an excuse to have some involvement with music while still pursuing a career in computer science.”
Although working with musical hardware and computer software feel very different, Professor Noble says there are also a lot of similarities.
“The same underlying principles and techniques apply: reasoning from effect to cause, debugging by elimination, analysing a problem into its component parts and combining those parts to get a working solution,” he says. “Except in software, if you want another oscillator module, you just click on a menu to get one. With hardware, if you have used all your oscillators you have to go back to The Rock Shop to buy one!”
Overall, Professor Noble enjoys combining his programming knowledge and expertise with his passion for music.
“I’m interested in mapping out all the different coding practices that can be used, from flamboyant artistic performance, to live programming that is often used as a teaching tool, to more experimental programming, and even to the carefully orchestrated work that happens in large systems. Through research, teaching, and music I can be both an observer and a participant in these different types of coding, and it’s fascinating to put myself in as many different places as I can.”