Palma Catravas, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering who regularly merges music and engineering in her Union courses, has been awarded a prestigious Schiff Fellowship for 2006-07 in support of her project, “Visualization of Information Content in Music Signals and Interdisciplinary Applications.”
The project aims to contribute scientific visualization tools to reveal patterns in data that could help with hypothesis generation in experimental work.
“Successful implementation of the project depends on choosing a good test data source, one in which characteristic effects (such as harmonics, coupling of modes, etc.) that are important in many areas of physics and engineering are buried,” Catravas says. “The beautifully complex and informationally rich sounds from musical instruments and musical compositions satisfy this criterion.”
Catravas says that electrical engineering-based techniques are well suited to this study, “as elegant analogs exist among models in acoustics, circuits and electromagnetics, and a wide variety of electrical sensors, optical diagnostics and signal processing techniques can be used in experiments.
“This choice also encourages the connection of basic electrical engineering techniques and musician's practices, including careful listening, tactile response, imagery and psychoacoustics.”
Catravas' research plan has two phases. She will develop a suite of scientific visualization tools to illuminate specific effects in sound and/or music; and she will transplant these tools to other areas of research. She will investigate applications in nanotechnology, biology and other disciplines.
Catravas, of Silver Spring, Md. holdsdouble bachelor's degrees in Electrical Engineering and Piano Performance (1991) from the University of Maryland and S.M., (1994) and Ph.D. (1998) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Electrical Engineering. She did post-graduate work at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (1998-2002). She is on leave this fall and winter.