LMC, School of Music Host Musical Residencies - Six metro Atlanta musicians and performers worked out of the Technology Square Research Building through April as part of a new STEAM musical residency program jointly hosted by the School of Literature, Media, and Communication and the School of Music.

Marching Band Honors Cecil Welch at Alumni Band Weekend - Cecil Welch (IM ‘58) was an internationally recognized trumpet player and advocate for musical education. Welch often returned to Tech to perform the national anthem before football and basketball games. The Marching Band, Symphonic Band, and Jazz Ensemble I all performed some of Welch's favorite music during Alumni Band Weekend in tribute to his legacy.

EarSketch Reaches Milestone One Million Users - Georgia Institute of Technology’s innovative educational platform EarSketch reached a milestone this month—one million users. Since launching in 2011, the free EarSketch platform has been used by students in all 50 U.S. states and in more than 100 countries. The music/coding platform was created at Georgia Tech by School of Music Chair Jason Freeman and Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts Professor Brian Magerko and is designed to teach students to code in Python or JavaScript through music and creative discovery.

Laura Ballestrino's Artist Residency Benefits Students Across Campus - School of Music's most recent artist-in-residence, Laura Ballestrino, gave a masterclass for Georgia Tech pianists, gave lectures to Music Technology students, visited the jazz ensembles, held a solo recital, and performed with the Georgia Tech Symphony Orchestra (GTSO) as a soloist.

Boykin Receives Opera America Award -  Brittney Boykin was one of seven composers commissioned to create a new work under Opera America's Opera Grants for Women Composers program. Boykin's Two Corners is a one-act opera set in rural Alabama shortly after the passage of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954.  The opera will be workshopped during the 2023 summer residency of Finger Lakes Opera’s Tomita Young Artists and premiered in downtown Rochester in August 2024.

Listening to Heartbeats Boosts Empathy - In a paper published at CHI 2021, Georgia Tech researchers hypothesized that hearing the heartbeat of another person would increase the listener’s empathic connection with that person. To test this hypothesis, they designed an experiment that paired auditory heartbeats with expressive images of eyes, the well-known Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task.

Leading the Change: Robotic Musicianship Lab - Jason Barnes has loved playing drums since he was a little boy. This didn’t change when he lost his arm in an electrical accident at the age of 22. Since 2013, Jason has been working with Gil Weinberg, a renowned roboticist and founding director of the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, to develop the world’s most advanced robotic drumming arm.

Students Touch the Future of Music at Guthman Musical Instrument Competition - According to Georgia Tech president Angel Cabrera, if you were lucky enough to be in Guthman Musical Instrument Competition audience, you got a rare look at the future of music. For Georgia Tech's music technology majors, though, the Competition also represents the pinnacle event of their creative study and research.

YouTube's "The Age of AI" Documentary Features Shimon, Drumming Arm, Skywalker Hand - The Age of A.I. is a 8 part documentary series hosted by Robert Downey Jr. covering the ways Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Neural Networks will change the world. This episode features technology developed by the Center for Music Technology.

Darren Waller Inspired by Music to Manifest His New Life - Music has always been a big part of Darren Waller’s life. During his time as a Georgia Tech football player and student, Waller learned more about his rich family past in jazz through Assistant Professor Chip Crotts' course. Waller is the great-grandson of Thomas “Fats” Waller, a charismatic pianist, prolific composer, and the first Black man to write the score for a Broadway musical. Music runs through his veins, and even now as an NFL player with the Raiders, music continues to be positive and creative outlet for him.

Music Heals the Heart - Music and the heart are intertwined. Musical works are influenced by arrhythmias, music listening induces physiological changes, performing music affects heartbeat patterns, and hearing heartbeats elicits empathy. Dr. Grace Leslie, director of the Brain Music Lab, co-authored an article published in Scientific American detailing the connection between music and an individual's cognitive and cardiac states.

Listen to Five of the World’s Newest, Wildest Instruments - The New York Times highlights five of the 2021 Guthman Musical Instrument Competition finalists in an article that focuses on invention and musical motivation. Get music critic Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim's take on our competitors' inventions.

LatinX Computer Science Students Focus of New Research - Georgia Tech and the University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras recently received a $2.9 million grant to design an informal learning computer science curriculum and broaden access to STEM education for LatinX students.