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Matt Wright

CREATE Research Director, Media Arts and Technology Graduate Program,
University of California, Santa Barbara
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PhD, Stanford / CCRMA,  B.A. UC Berkeley /CNMAT,  Post-Doc UVic/MISTIC

Dr. Wright's dissertation "The Shape of an Instant: Measuring and Modeling Perceptual Attack Time with Probability Density Functions" concerned models of musical rhythm, including onsets, repetition, pulsation, meter, and phrasing, with particular emphasis on the question of when exactly we perceive musical events to occur. His interests are both theoretical and practical, aimed towards computer simulation of perceptual aspects of listening to musical rhythm for the construction of "automatic listeners". He worked for 15 years as the Musical Systems Designer at UC Berkeley's Center for New Music and Audio Technology (CNMAT), conducting research in topics including intimate musical control of computers, sound analysis and resynthesis, and rhythm; at CNMAT he helped to develop and propagate the now well established and much appreciated SDIF (Sound Description Interchange Format) and OSC (Open Sound Control) standards. His post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Victoria was devoted to the emerging field of computational ethnomusicology, and he is now the Research Director at UC Santa Barbara's Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (CREATE). He is also an accomplished musician, focusing for the last many years on musics of non-Western cultures, with a special interest in Afro-Brazilian percussion and on the musics of India, Afghanistan, the Middle East, and North Africa.