The Media Laboratory
Massachusetts InstituteJoseph A. Paradiso, Ph.D.
of TechnologyAssociate Professor
20 Ames St. E15-327Sony Career Development Professor of Media Arts & Sciences
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139Co Director, Things That Think Consortium
Director, Responsive Environments Group
Tel: 617-253-8988, Fax 617-253-6215
November 16, 2009
Microsoft Faculty Fellowship Program
Selection Committee
Committee Members:
I’m delighted to strongly support Prof. Sergi Jorda’s selection as a Microsoft Faculty Fellow. Sergi is a real star in the world of human-computer interfaces and musical controllers - he represents that rare cross between competent artist, academic, and engineer.
I’ve known Sergi since 2001, where we met at the first CHI Conference workshop on new musical controllers that was about to become the well-known NIME conference in following years. We immediately launched into what became a many-years-long intense conversation about music and technology, and musical controllers in particular. Sergi’s knowledge about computer music, musical control, and human-computer interfaces is extremely solid – he’s a deep thinker, and an internationally recognized resource on digital music control. But most importantly, he’s also a real innovator who gets good ideas and puts them into practice, literally on the world’s stage. He refines his ideas over time, and builds up a solid following who play his controllers and work in his software environments. His extremely well-known recent interface, the ReacTable, indeed shows how successful his work can be – it’s rare to get a new musical controller accepted into a performing mainstream, but Sergi has gotten there with the ReacTable. His background in analog synthesis and his strong aesthetic/design sense have inspired in an environment where it’s easy and fun to get started using his instrument, but even more impressively, performances can improve with practice – the instrument has a depth that very few new instruments have achieved. Indeed, especially when compared to canonical laptop instruments or musical applications running on various interactive tables (most of which have appeared in reaction to the ReacTable), Sergi’s system reigns supreme. Especially with MSR’s strong recent interest in computing surfaces, Sergi will be very well matched with much of MSR’s research agenda. The ReacTable is by no means Sergi’s only success – indeed, his FMOL program was a very impressive software synthesis environment with a very practical user interface that spawned a large user community who were very active producing, sharing, and co-authoring FMOL compositions.
I was invited to give a week of lectures in Barcelona this spring under the CSIM program – my lectures centered on musical interfaces, hence I had many of Sergi’s students in my class. They were very well grounded and enthusiastic – he does a great job teaching. Sergi’s papers and talks are always worth reading and seeing, and I often assign them to my own students. He’s one of the deep thinkers (and doers) in today’s world of music control and performance, and with the recent massive success of musical games, it’s clear that new modes of musical control are more important now than ever.
In summary, I’m totally in support of Sergi’s application for an MSR fellowship. I have many ties to colleagues at MSR myself, including the Cambridge Lab to which Sergi is applying, so I know the MSR culture well. I’m confident that MSR researchers will glean tremendous benefit through spending time with Sergi.
Sincerely Yours,
Prof. Joseph A. Paradiso