Citizen ’Cane

The Nu Sound of Music

Photo: Tayla Elk

A few years ago Hyken paired up with conductor Jacomo Bairos and integrated some of Miami’s best musicians, composers, DJs, and dancers, plus visual and media artists, to form Nu Deco Ensemble, a groundbreaking chamber orchestra that Huffington Post has called “a risk-taking, powerful, experimental high-speed train heading into the future with a sound inviting us aboard.”

Nu Deco debuted in Miami’s Wynwood Art District after receiving a $75,000 grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, plus other funding. Since then, they’ve launched two seasons, premiering Hyken’s orchestral arrangements of music by Daft Punk and LCD Sound System, new works by composers Paul Dooley, Jorge Martín, and Adam Schoenberg, and collaborations with Miami-based musicians Spam Allstars, Afrobeta, and Brika, among others.

“We wanted to create an ensemble local musicians could call their own,” says Hyken, whose assembly of top professionals included Frost School faculty Gabriel Beavers (bassoon), Craig Morris (trumpet), Karen Lord-Powell (violin), M.M. ’14, Brian Powell (double bass), and Svet Stoyanov (percussion), among others. They often perform at The Lightbox at Goldman Warehouse, a cooperative art space.

“Sam and Jacomo were really determined to build a hip, contemporary chamber orchestra playing music that not only has broad appeal, but also opens the ears of the audience to other musical tastes,” says Beavers. “Sam’s arrangements draw people in, tapping into the aesthetic of Miami’s art scene.”

Hyken says he enrolled as a master’s student in the Frost School’s Media Writing and Production Program for its “buffet of skill offerings, from creating new music to managing the business side of things” and because he “craved more diversity and wanted to make a bigger impact on the musical world.”

Before Frost, he was a fellow in the New World Symphony, performed with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, and graduated from Juilliard. “Being a complete artist in the 21st century means more than knowing your instrument,” he explains. “It’s also about how to do basic video editing, website development, composing, arranging, producing, and more.”

Now Hyken’s multigenre aesthetic is contributing to a vibrant new music culture in Miami, where young people are cheering for the sounds of the classics, reinvented.
—Wendy Rees

The post The Nu Sound of Music appeared first on University of Miami: Miami Magazine.

Famed flutist kicks off his UM connection with lively master class

Virtuoso flutist Sir James Galway shares his love of learning with UM student Maria Eugenia Vallejo.
Photos: Versatile Light Studios

With a twinkle in his eye and a bounce in his step, the Belfast-born and world-revered flutist Sir James Galway conducted a master class at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music in March, entertaining the audience with musical stories from his vast solo and orchestral career, sharing his practice routines, and coaxing student performers to the top of their artistry with a laser-sharp focus on intonation, intent, and interpretation.

A household name with over 30 million recordings sold worldwide, and over five decades of touring and teaching, Galway, who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 2001, coached four flutists from the Frost School in the Weeks Center for Recording and Performance. They are all students of Trudy Kane, an associate professor who was principal flutist with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra for 32 years before joining the Frost School’s faculty.

“The bad news about flute playing is it requires time to be good,” Galway joked at the start of the class. “I think about Arnold Schwarzenegger in his body-building days. When he posed for a photo, he had all these muscles showing everywhere. He didn’t get them from just doing bench presses! He worked all of his muscles. So, we have to do the same, and practice the nitty-gritty bits.”

The master class students, Mackenzie Miller, Maria Vallejo, Trey Bradshaw, and doctoral candidate Emilio Rutllant, M.M. ’14, performed repertoire for solo flute and piano by French composers Philippe Gaubert, Jules Mouquet, and Charles-Marie Widor, accompanied by Frost faculty pianist Oleksii Ivanchenko, D.M.A. ’15.

At first Galway coached each on technical matters such as breathing and fingering, but soon moved on to tone and timbre. “We have to train the embouchure, not the fingers,” he said, referring to the use of facial muscles and mouth on an instrument.

He praised the quality of Frost’s rising young talent and encouraged them to shoot high. He suggested Bradshaw perform a line again without taking a breath, even though most flutists breathe in the passage. “As a teacher, I like my students to strive to be better than me,” he shared. “You don’t want to be the same as the guys before; you want to be outstandingly better.”

When asked about his legacy, Galway, 77, humbly reflected, “I would like to leave behind a number of committed flute players. That is, committed to playing music, not just a dexterous reading of the score… really committed to showing their soul. I’d like to think I’ve shown a few people how to play a phrase from within, to play a good line, to devote themselves to really making music on another level.”

Galway trained with famed French flutist Marcel Moyse and performed with several opera orchestras in London, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Berlin Philharmonic before launching a solo career.

As one of the University’s first Presidential Distinguished Scholars, the highly decorated Galway will return in the fall from his home in Switzerland to work and perform with orchestras in the Frost School, and continue his lessons with the flute studio.

“James Galway reveals his soul to the audience every time he performs, and that inspires everyone who performs with him to do the same,” said Shelton Berg, dean of the Frost School. “Students who were in his presence today will never forget it.”

Other recent Distinguished Presidential appointments have included the Cuban journalist Yoani Sánchez, photographer Susan Meiselas, and population geneticist Carlos Bustamante.

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Alumni awarded $120K for medical startup with musical roots.

Triomi’s Amanda, Mike, and Sean arrive in Kansas City.

In October 2010, months after a 7.0 magnitude earthquake wreaked havoc in Haiti, Mike Battaglia, B.S. ’09, and Sean Murphy, B.S.B.E. ’09, M.D. ’13, were volunteering in the IT department at the UM-affiliated Hospital Bernard Mevs Project Medishare in Port-au-Prince when a woman showed up complaining of chest pains. The hospital’s only EKG had broken down and a doctor asked the pair for help.

Sean and Mike work on the broken EKG machine in Haiti. Photo courtesy Triomi

“The guitar strings are basically copper. So we grabbed those, grabbed some duct tape, and walked into the ER. People are looking at us going, ‘What the heck?’’’ recalls Battaglia. “But we rigged the equipment, picked the best connection, and the doctor on call was able to get the reading.”

As it turned out, the woman was not having a heart attack. But if the machine hadn’t worked, her family was looking at a costly airlift that would have bankrupted them.

The lightbulbs went off “right away,” says Murphy, who as a student regularly carried around a list of “million-dollar ideas” for businesses he and Battaglia wanted to start one day.

“We knew by the end of the night we had something, the idea, the makings, of a portable EKG,” Murphy recounts. “We could see there was this need for a small, portable EKG you could use in a place like Haiti, that could be deployed anywhere, that could help save lives. So we started right that night to re-engineer the architecture of the EKG, to find ways to make it cheaper, make it simpler, and a couple of years later here we are.”

That was the birth of Triomi, which has a third ’Cane, Amanda Zelman, B.M. ’11, as its chief operating officer.

The startup plans to manufacture groundbreaking portable 12-lead EKG machines that can be used in developing countries as well as by doctors and nurses doing homecare in the United States.

In March, Triomi was selected for the prestigious Sprint Techstars program, receiving $120,000 in funding and a three-month “accelerator” boot camp in Kansas City for mobile health startups looking to hone their products and pitches for angel investors.

“The EKG technology was so arcane—it still had a printer built into it,” says Battaglia. “Can you imagine if your laptop had a printer built into it? We want to normalize the idea that the EKG is something every doctor can use just like the stethoscope, something they can carry around with them. That’s not a paradigm that’s possible when you’re still wheeling around an EKG with a printer attached to it.”

Colby Leider, director of the Music Engineering Technology Program (MuE) at the Frost School of Music, was Battaglia’s adviser and isn’t surprised at all by the success of his former student, who also studied jazz piano with Frost School Dean Shelly Berg.

“You realize within five minutes after talking with Mike that he’s a polymath—he’s wickedly smart,” says Leider. “He’s exactly the kind of student President Shalala wanted to bring to the University when she started here, and the kind of musician-scholar Dean Berg set out to recruit to Frost when he arrived.”

What the duo did with the EKG was apply many of the lessons Battaglia learned at the school’s pioneering MuE program, which was founded by Bill Porter—Elvis Presley’s sound engineer—after he relocated to Miami in the 1970s. The program was the first of its kind and now provides graduates to a wide array of companies that use sound technology like Bose, Apple, Microsoft, and Sennheiser.

“Mike talks to me constantly about how the skills that he learned in the program were about digital signal processing,” explains Leider. “There’s really nothing fundamentally different between a piece of music, looking at the structural analysis of an audio file in Pandora or Spotify, versus looking at the signal coming off an EKG from the beating of a human heart. They’re all signals—amplitude versus time.”
—Tim Collie

The post Sound Device appeared first on University of Miami: Miami Magazine.

Could Rocky Balboa have beaten Clubber Lang if his training montage hadn’t been set to Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger”? Maybe, but once Rocky III audiences heard those up-tempo rock riffs, they wouldn’t dream of exercising without adding the track to their Walkman cassette tapes. To this day, the tune is a popular pick for workout playlists. • Colby Leider, associate professor and director of the Music Engineering Technology program at the Frost School of Music, knows a lot about musical motivation. He and biomedical engineer Vibhor Agrawal, Ph.D. ’10, an assistant professor in the Department of Physical Therapy at the Miller School of Medicine, are orchestrating a first-of-its-kind collaboration among musicians, biomedical engineers, and physical therapists to create a mobile app that motivates amputees to knock out harmful walking habits.

The unlikely marriage of these disciplines began in 2010, when Robert S. Gailey Jr., B.S.Ed. ’82, M.S.Ed. ’86, a physical therapy professor at the Miller School, arranged for his then-teenage son, Max, to chat with Leider about the Frost School’s Music Engineering Technology program. While in Leider’s office, Gailey took note of a graduate student’s research poster detailing a system that measures runners’ steps per minute and selects songs from their iPod library that have the same number of beats per minute.Gailey, who holds a research appointment at the Miami VA Healthcare System and is an advisor on prosthetics to the U.S. Department of Defense, immediately thought of the potential for soldiers who’ve lost limbs in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Robert Gailey Jr., B.S.Ed. ’82, M.S.Ed. ’86, guides study participant Kelly Elizabeth in a balanced walk.

“I know a whole lot of amputees who are already listening to music,” Gailey says. “So if we can get their music to talk to their prosthetics and vice versa, the sky’s the limit in terms of rehabilitation.”

For 20 years Gailey has fitted patients with prosthetics made by an Icelandic company called Össur, which has awarded Leider and Gailey a research grant to design and conduct a clinical trial of a new mobile app that employs audio, visual, social media, and haptic (vibration) feedback. The various signals let users know if they’re walking in a way that could cause body fatigue, ulcers on the stump attached to the prosthetic, or stress on the non-amputated leg, which greatly increases risk of double amputation.

“It’s a computer, it’s a phone, it’s a musical instrument—and by the way, you can talk to your knee on it,” Leider says, pointing to his iPhone.

The Össur study is one of six research projects, along with several more student projects, presently under way at the University’s Functional Outcomes Research and Evaluation (FORE) Center on the Coral Gables campus, including a collaboration with the Frost School’s Department of Music Therapy to determine how and when infants begin responding to music with physical movement. Another study, funded by a grant from the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation, came to the center by way of Christopher Bennett, B.S.E.E. ’05, M.S.M.E.T. ’07, Ph.D. ’10, Frost School research assistant professor, jazz pianist, and expert on how humans respond to auditory signals.

Bennett completed his postdoc under Miller School anesthesiologist Richard McNeer, M.D./Ph.D. ’99, exploring how the cacophony of hospital monitoring devices affects stress levels in both patients and clinicians. The study allows Bennett, McNeer, and now Leider to continue that work. They are using a sophisticated set of microphones to isolate and record all sound sources in operating rooms at Ryder Trauma Center. The researchers play back the sounds for medical residents while the residents perform tasks on patient simulators at the Miller School’s Center for Patient Safety.

Bennett’s expertise in psychoacoustics makes him an invaluable collaborator to Leider, Agrawal, and Gailey on the Össur study because it requires deploying sounds to simultaneously convey data that alert amputees when they’re doing something wrong, signal which movement is incorrect, and reward them when they improve
their gait.

It’s a computer, it’s a phone, it’s a musical instrument
—and by the way, you can talk to your knee on it.”

“When I first started in this field, amputees were basically relegated to a wheelchair,” Gailey says. “At UM we’ve brought rehabilitation to the highest level. The military has actually taken 50 service members with a prosthetic limb back into the field. We know we can get them there physically, but they want to know how they’re doing.”

Gailey says the mobile app will be like a “coach or therapist they can keep with them” without having to visit a rehab center, saving time and insurance costs. “When patients start noticing they’re getting tired more often, they can run the program without taking time away from family or work.”

Designing this handheld “coach” involves a lot of technical know-how, not just about app programming but also about the prosthetic limbs that communicate with the app. Össur engineers from Reykjavik, Iceland, routinely visit the FORE Center to help implement and adjust all the sensors, accelerometers, gyroscopes, and other widgets in the study’s three microprocessor knee models—the Justin Bieber, the Lady Gaga, and the Britney Spears. The pop-star labels are Össur’s way of giving UM musician-researchers a chuckle as they keep track of each prototype.

From left, the Britney Spears, aka Rheo Knee, is one of three models. Colby Leider explains to music engineering majors Jena Macias and Max Gailey how an Össur microprocessor knee adjusts its stiffness to the wearer’s activity.

The Britney Spears knee is actually the company’s Rheo Knee, which is the knee worn by study participant Kelly Elizabeth, who, as an ER technician, a nursing student, and a mother, spends a lot of time on her feet. Elizabeth lost her leg in a boating accident in 2001 and was introduced to Gailey and the Össur study by her prosthetist, Adam Finnieston, who also works with Project Medishare in Haiti.

“At first I didn’t know what I was getting myself into,” Elizabeth recalls. “But from the moment I put on [the Rheo Knee], I noticed a bounce in my step. It was—from what I remember—what it felt like to walk on two legs.”

Elizabeth travels from her home in Port St. Lucie, Florida, several times a week to the FORE Center, where wireless sensors on her body and floor sensors in the lab track her movements while she listens to her favorite songs on her iPod.

The FORE Center team is choosing methods of pairing music with movement in a way that would make behaviorist B.F. Skinner proud.

One way to encourage good walking behaviors is through what Leider calls a “vocabulary of auditory penalty and auditory reward.” This can be done with pleasing or displeasing songs or sounds, or it can be done with auditory effects on your favorite music.

“If we want to convey that you did something good,” Leider says, “we might supply an enhanced bass response, or we might make it a little louder. We could also cue an auditory effect penalty, like bit crushing. You as a user don’t need to know anything about mixing. All you know is that the beautiful Norah Jones song you were just listening to now sounds like it came through a 1950s telephone.”

The app is on track to be tested this summer in a clinical trial with amputees wearing the Össur Rheo knee.

While music is one of the primary feedback systems in the app, it’s important to include other mechanisms because the goal is to show users exactly what they’re doing wrong. With eight different gait variations and multiple movements involved in those variations, a vast catalog of sensory signals is necessary. But is it possible for a person to receive several kinds of signals at once and understand what they mean?

“We’re already doing it,” Leider says. “Your phone gives you feedback in the form of pictures, sounds, and vibration, all happening simultaneously. And you’re able to distinguish what these signals all mean—whether you’re getting a text message versus an email versus a phone call and who it’s from.”

Leider, Agrawal, Bennett, and Gailey make the perfect quartet for the Össur study and other research opportunities that are bound to spring from it. Leider is quick to point out that the Frost School’s Music Engineering Technology program was the first music engineering program in the United States as well as “one of the few places in the country where you need to be a geek and you need to be passionate about music.”

“Nobody in medicine can do what the Music Engineering Technology folks can do,” Gailey says. “What we learn can be translated to Parkinson’s disease, people with balance issues, and so many other areas of study.”

Gailey, who has published dozens of research articles, returned wounded soldiers to active duty, and enabled double amputees to run again competitively, calls his work with Leider, Agrawal, and Bennett “the most exciting project I’ve ever been involved with.

“I know this is the tip of the iceberg,” he continues, “and I can’t even see how far it’s going to expand.”

This story first appeared in Score, the Frost School of Music magazine.

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Frost MusicReach programs are playing a key part in enriching young lives with music

Mentor Angelo Versace, D.M.A. ’13, shares the keyboard with a quartet of young students in the Overtown Music Project. Photos: Greg Clark

Six-year-old Amad Nelson dutifully claps to the rhythm of an American bluegrass fiddle tune, paying close attention to the changes in tempo. The lively song, “Boil ’Em Cabbage Down,” is played deftly on the violin by the college-age instructor, whose tapping foot acts as a metronome.

A creative lesson about the violin’s four strings and the notes they represent— G, D, A, and E—piques the interest of Khyairee Jackson, 7. “There are strings on the violin, and these strings have names, sort of like how we have names,” explains Zach Piper, a graduate string performance major at the Frost School of Music and a student mentor in one of the Frost School’s many community outreach initiatives. “So let’s call the ‘G’ string ‘George.’ Everyone say, ‘Hey, George.’” The five students respond “Hey, George!” in unison.

Under the umbrella name of Frost MusicReach, graduate and undergraduate students from the Frost School provide free music education programs—funded through grants, strategic partnerships, and private donations—that target underserved and disadvantaged areas of Miami-Dade County, including West Grove, North Miami, Overtown, Goulds, and South Miami.

Program coordinator Cassandra Eisenreich, M.M. ’09, D.M.A. ’12, encourages Amad Nelson in a beginning clapping activity.

“In addition to teaching music, much of what we do here is to mentor these children, to teach them what’s right and what’s wrong, how to share, and how to speak to one another,” says Cassandra Eisenreich, M.M. ’09, D.M.A. ’12, a flutist and the outreach and program coordinator at the Frost School.

In what is known as the Harmony Project-Coconut Grove, the Frost School partners with Miami-Dade

District 7 and Miami-Dade Parks to offer music classes in that neighborhood to students from The Barnyard and Elizabeth Virrick Park Community Center. The Frost School also provides music education and mentorship in conjunction with Frederick Douglass Elementary in Overtown, two charter schools affiliated with the nonprofit ASPIRA of Florida Charter Schools, and the Guitars Over Guns Organization (GOGO), a nonprofit started by Chad Bernstein, B.M. ’06, M.M. ’09, D.M.A. ’12.

“There is research that clearly shows that for young, underserved, or at-risk kids, being involved in a music program where they are actively making music makes them far more likely to stay in school and graduate,” says Frost School Dean Shelly Berg, who has made community outreach a priority for the school since his arrival in 2007.

Other outreach programs take place at Miami Edison Middle School, West Lab Elementary, Ludlam Elementary, Mays Conservatory, and 2-1 Mentoring Program.

—Lisa Sedelnick, M.A. ’00

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