3 minute read
RAT-A-TAT-T-APP
JUAN DIEGO MORA ’25
RAT-A-TAT-T-APP
Before enrolling in the Bard Conservatory in 2021, Juan Diego Mora ’25 was principal of the percussion section of the Regional Orchestra of Táchira (Venezuela). Like all Conservatory students, Mora had to choose a second major, but after so many years focused on music—and eager to learn more about music as a whole—this was not an easy or obvious choice.
“I chose computational sciences without really thinking about it too much,” says Mora. “Growing up I never felt drawn to computers, and programming was completely foreign to me. But two percussionist friends were majoring in computational sciences, and I was influenced by them. It took me three years of persistence to truly get the hang of it, but I discovered that programming is far more than what anybody can teach you—it’s a creative tool that can be intertwined with nearly anything in life, including music. I’ve had the freedom to explore unconventional aspects of programming that aren’t typically covered at other schools, and that has allowed me to focus on what I would really like to do as a programmer: develop musical software.”
Mora’s computational sciences Senior Project is a live looping app designed to allow musicians to record individual parts of a composition and play them back together, layering them into a cohesive performance. Looping in the analog days was done with an actual loop of tape, so the playback was limited to whatever was on that piece of tape. Looping effects have come a long way, but Mora’s app will generate audio playback in real time, which will “make the software behave more like a real instrument than like a piece of software,” says Mora. “There’s lots of software and hardware that do looping, but they all do it in a very specific way, which limits musicians to one kind of looping performance. I’m trying to get away from that.”
Mora is approaching the idea of looping from a different angle; rather than the traditional “stack-based” approach, where a loop of music can be dropped into a recording or performance, he is taking what he describes as a more “linear” view. In the recording studio, there are a variety of digital audio workstations (DAW). Linear DAWs, as the name implies, allow a linear workflow, and editing is done sequentially. This will create “the ability to schedule loops anywhere in a musical composition, not being tied to a tempo or structure, giving the performer full control over everything,” says Mora. To accomplish this, he’s had to look closely at various programming languages and existing audio software, and figure out functionality, appearance, and implementation. With the help of his adviser, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Director of Computational Sciences Sven Anderson, and research conducted using artificial intelligence tools, Mora has designed a development structure for the app and aims to have it ready to use during his senior recital.
