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Jonathan Berger
The Denning Family Provostial Professor, Department of Music, Co-Director of Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts (SiCa), Co-Director of Stanford’s Art Initiative, William R. and Gretchen B. Kimball University Fellow in Undergraduate Education

Biography

Jonathan Berger is a composer and researcher who explores effective ways of using sound to convey information. Berger is the Billie Bennett Achilles Professor in Performance, the William R. and Gretchen B. Kimball University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, Co-Director of the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts (SiCa), and Co-Director of Stanford’s Art Initiative.  He is also affiliated with the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), where he teaches composition and music theory and cognition.  He is a composer and researcher, with over 60 publications in a wide range of fields relating to music, science and technology. Research includes studies in music cognition, snal processing and statistical methods for automatic music recognition, classification and transcription, sonification and audio restoration. Berger's most recent CD, Miracles and Mud, was released by Naxos Records on their American Masters series in Spring 2007.

Berger has composed symphonic works, three concerti, works for all varieties of chamber ensemble, vocal, choral and electroacoustic works. His works can be heard on the Sony Classical, Harmonia Mundi, Centaur, Neuma, CRI, and IMA labels and his scholarly work has been published by MIT Press, the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, the Journal of Music Theory, and Leonardo.  Among his awards and commissions are three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, prizes from ASCAP, commissions from WDR, and prizes from the Bourges Festival.  Berger’s millennium sound installation, Echoes of Light and Time, was heard by over 2 million visitors and received international praise. His current commissions include Tears in Your Hand for piano trio, a violin concerto and his fourth string quartet.

In addition to composition, he is actively involved in research on signal processing and music cognition. His work on denoising (together with CCRMA PhD Charles Nichols and Yale Professor Ronald Coifman) produced a transcription and reconstruction of the historic 1889 cylinder recording of Johannes Brahms playing the piano. This work was featured on NPR’s Performance Today and in the New York Times and will soon appear on a CD-ROM by Yamaha. He is also founding director of Yale University’s Center for Studies in Music Technology.

Berger has collaborated with a range of scientists, such as those in Stanford’s Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience Laboratory, to investigate the effects of music on the brain.  In addition, he has overseen the details for the annual SiCa Center for Arts, Science and Technology’s Symposium on Music, Rhythm, and the Brain since it was founded in 2006.  His research interests also include neural net modeling of musical expectations, computational models of generative procedures, feature detection in digital audio using adapted local trigonometric bases and wavelet packets, development of a unified representation of sound and analytical structure in music.

Key Works

• Musical Expectations.  MIT Press.
• Miracles and Mud. American Masters Series. Naxos Records, 2007.
• Tears in Your Hand. Commissioned by the Gryphon Trio, Premiered at Stanford University, January 7, 2007.
• Jiyeh. Performed for A Concert of Music on Ecology and the Environment, organized by CCRMA, November 9, 2006 at the Imaging Environment conference, Stanford University

Prof. Berger in the News

• Historic Edison recordings come back to life
  San Francisco Chronicle, February 2, 2012
• Stanford Composer explores how memory affects music
  Stanford Report, March 3, 2010
• Networks and Network Analysis for the Humanities:  An NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities
  UCLA Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, August 15-27, 2010
• Audio Compression May Not Be So Bad
  San Francisco Chronicle, May 12, 2010
• Younger listeners have come to prefer lo-fi versions of rock songs to hi-fi ones
  New York Times, December 14, 2009
• Why Spotify may spell the end of ownership: A new music website with millions of songs has the potential to change how we will access our entertainment in future
  Times of London, March 15, 2009
• iPod Generation Prefers MP3 Fidelity, Study Says
  PC World, March 5, 2009
• Young Music Fans Deaf to iPod's Limitations
  Times of London, March 5, 2009
• Scholars speak on influence of Beatles
  Stanford Daily, February 22, 2008
• "Bridal" groomed
  Denver Post, January 22, 2008
• Professor decodes life note by note: He teams with scientists to use music to simplify information
  San Francisco Chronicle, February 5, 2007
• Stanford prof star of Gryphon Trio ensemble
  Stanford Daily, January 10, 2007
• A place for peace: Inspired by a quiet room and a wartime song, composer brings a new work to Stanford
  Palo Alto Weekly, December 29, 2006
• Digging up sound: Math—and an archaeologist’s touch—bring back Brahms
  Stanford Magazine, July/August, 2005
• Strings attached: Stanford’s resident ensemble, onstage and off
  Stanford Magazine, September/October, 2004
• Composer Jonathan Berger creates theme music for Clark Center
  Stanford Report, October 22, 2003
• Israeli, Palestinian music share turf in composer’s new work
  Stanford Report, September 11, 2002

Audio and Video

• [Broadcast] Today’s generation prefers sound of digital music, just as previous generations preferred the sounds of vinyl
  ABC 7 News at 9 PM on KOFY-TV CH 20, March 5, 2009
• The Sound of Cancer, and Golf
  Weekend America on American Public Media, January 12, 2008
• Adult Attention Deficit Disorder
  Leading Matters, LearnOutLoud.com