Music may be an afterthought for the average gamer, but it is one of the most important aspects of game development and success. Oftentimes, music is what makes a horror game legitimately scary or an action game truly heart-pounding. Yet the process has become clichéd, almost always consisting of small bits of music called “cues” that are constantly looped and cross-faded. With Unity3D and uRTcmix, real-time music generation can enhance VR/AR/desktop/mobile games' user experience and deepen their emotional connection with the story. Read more here.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Columbia University established the DIY Ventilator Challenge in April 2020 for teams to create an open-source, low-cost emergency ventilator in the event of a dire shortage of ventilators. The goal was to create a mechanism that can automatically inflate and deflate an ambu bag in a systematic manner, and Columbia selected a few of the best design ideas to create a working prototype. I participated in the challenge along with two research scientists from the Columbia University Medical Center to create a ventilator design. Read more here.

mTonal is an iOS microtonal synthesizer app and MPE controller for musicians who want to explore the microtonal realm of music. It is uniquely designed as a quarter-tone piano with 24 notes per octave that can glide smoothly between notes. The app was created using Swift, Xcode, and an open-source framework called AudioKit (MIT license) for the sound synthesis of the presets in the app. mTonal was featured at the Audio Developer Conference 2018 in a keynote speech by Dr. Aure Prochazka, AudioKit’s founder. mTonal was also showcased by AudioKit on their website, which is available here. More information about mTonal can be found here. 

Percussion Evoluzione is a music composition I wrote, and I won the 2018 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award for this piece. Percussion instruments encompass some of the oldest music instruments in human history, and there are wide variety of both pitched and unpitched percussion around the world than any other music instrument family. Read more here.

Fugue Generator is an algorithmic music composition generator that uses stochastic Markov models to create fugues in the style of Bach. The program was written using Python and a Python library called music21 developed by MIT. I trained my model using the fugues from Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier. Read more here.

Ivan Wyschnegradsky was a Russian composer and a pioneer of microtonality in Western music. He created the Manual of Quarter-Tone Harmony in 1932, which includes a quarter-tone harmonic syntax, acoustic basis of the 24-TET system, artificial quarter-tone scales, quarter-tone atonality and polytonality. The initial set of 24 preludes written in 1934 rigidly adhered to the 13-tone scale, but Wyschnegradsky wrote a revised set in the 1960s and 70s that includes quarter tones outside the 13-tone scale. Read more here.

Check out this cool do-it-yourself music instrument using a clipboard!  Pitched sounds were created by plucking a long rubber band on the side of the clipboard, and unpitched sounds were created by placing colored pencils/paper clips on top of the clipboard and tapping/tilting the clipboard. Read more here.