[MUSIC]

Hello everyone.
And welcome to California Institute of the
Arts.
[MUSIC]
My name is Ajay Kapur, and I'm the
associate
dean for research and development in the
digital arts.
As well as the director of music
technology here at the institute.
Many of you might be wondering where are
we.
This is actually in my office.
Meet some of my robots.
Tammy, Mahadevi bot, whom we'll actually
get
to see move and play music, by the last
week of this class.
And this is my custom built, Indian
stringed instrument, the e-sitar.
So, you have signed up to learn how to
program.
I want to talk a little bit about why I
think that this is a good idea.
First of all, in this day and age those of
you who
are artists probably use a computer to do
your creative work.
If you do not know how to program
You are relying on software that companies
have made
to control what you can do with your
computer.
When you learn to program, you will be in
control.
I am betting you're one of those people
who want
more out of your computer.
And now you can invent what you want.
Some of you might be thinking that
programming
will help you get a job in the future.
While I can't promise immediate
outplacement after
you finish this class, I can say.
That I have a great job and my students
who took this course have great jobs as
well,
due in no small part to their ability to
program and solve problems.
There is an increase in demand for people
who know how to program or at
least understand the jargon, and the
implications
importance of what computer programs and
programmers do.
Especially in the creative domain.
Perhaps you already know how to program in

a language such as Java,

but you find it doesn't do what you want.
Or maybe, you're coming to this class
with a big idea, or many, and just want
the tools to help you realize them.
Maybe you're looking to shift directions.
In your art making.
Speaking of which, I've been a musician
all my life.
I started playing drums when I was eight,
and played in jazz
bands, and later electronic dance bands,
for the past 25 years.
When I was in college, I started to get in
touch with
my roots and started to learn how to play
Indian classical musics.
As I was very interested in improvisation.
At the same time as both of my parents
were
both working for IBM, I was very
interested in computers.
So, since I was young
I would always have this dream of building
a robot that I could improvise with.
After learning how to program, my dreams
came true.
Here's an example or me playing my e-sitar
with the Mahadevi bot.
Notice that the robot will not play unless
I'm playing.
These performance paradigms are possible
once
you learn to program.
When I started teaching at Cal Arts, the
first thing I did was start developing
this course.
I realized how important it was for my
students to be able to program in order
to achieve their creative ideas as
performers and digital artists.
I want to give you an example of how
learning to program changed my students
lives and the
type of projects that they were able to
achieve.
[MUSIC]
They include everything from building new
software instruments, to building new
interfaces for musical expression, to
building robotic musical instruments.
[MUSIC].
To building digital arts installations, to
interactive visualizations,
to dance technology, to designing new
multimedia performance paradigms.
Working with these students, I was able to
create my
machine orchestra, a symbiotic ensemble of
humans and machines.

And because we all know how to program, we

invented our own instruments,
our own network to communicate to each
other, and our own form of performance
art.
Check it out.
[MUSIC]
[MUSIC]
So I hope I have convinced you as to why
you should learn to program.
And inspired you to become creative
programmers and help
bring out new mediums of art of the
future.
In this course, I'm going to teach you how
to program in a revolutionary music
language known as Chuck.
Chuck is primarily an audio
programming language but is useful for all
creative
work using a computer, as you will soon
see.
In this class, each week, we will present
to you a
series of core computer science theory and
concepts, through music examples.
And each week, your assignment will be to
create a 30 second composition using these
skills.
So this is going to be a really fun way to
get through fairly advanced material.
Don't worry if you've never programmed
before
as we are going to start at the beginning.
Also, if you do have experience
programming, but want to learn about
creative coding or music programming, or
just want to learn about how to use Chuck.
Then you will also be happy with how we've
set out this course.
We also recommend that
you get the book that we have written to
accompany this Coursera class as it
has extra examples and different
explanations of key concepts and more.
Information on the book is available on
the Coursera site.
Finally, I realize that to make this
course the best
it could be, I would have to invite some
guest
lecturers to join us on our adventure.
I invited Dr. Perry Cook.
Who was my professor in computer science
and music at Princeton University.
He is a signal processing and synthesis
algorithm master.
And we will bring him in on week
five to explain the advance topic of
unigenerators.

And we could not do this course on Chuck

without inviting the inventor of the
language Dr. Ge Wang who created Chuck while
doing his Phd with Perry at Princeton.
And is now a professor at Stanford
University at
the Center for Computer Research in Music
and Acoustics.
In fact, I'm going to let
Gowan introduce you to Chuck right now,
let's get started.