Continued Funding

The timeline for implementation describes an aggressive plan for actuating fundraising mechanisms that will capitalize upon the resources made available through this funding request. Of course, the rapidly-changing circumstances of high technology will necessarily dictate a fair amount of flexibility on our part -- but this flexibility will be tempered with a strong sense of our own academic and educational mission.

Towards this end, we have already begun to mount a tactical campaign of specific fundraising initiatives aimed to meet our strategic objectives. We will be augmenting and refining these initiatives as opportunities arise. The following is a brief listing/description of our current fundraising activities related to this proposal:

The On-line Reserves/Sonic Glossary project has been upscaled to a much higher level of production. We will be developing strategies for making best use of this project with Anne Kirschner and Columbia Media Enterprises. We expect to have nearly 100 entries for the Sonic Glossary finished by the end of the first project year.
Thanassis Rikakis (Assistant Director of the CMC) has been developing a large project in cooperation with the European Children's Television Center to demonstrate the potential of Digital Television at the Third World Summit on Educational Technologies/2000 (the World Summit is held once every four years). The European Union/Eurovision has issued a special invitation to us for the proposed work. This substantial project will be coordinated through the CMC, relying on many of the technologies we have developed for application in both pedagogy and artistic performance.
We are also pursuing a number of initiatives with IBM/Watson Research Center, including participation in the Summit/2000 event. The Music Research Group at IBM is very interested in working with us on joint research into sophisticated musical models; models which would form the basis for extended educational and performance interfaces. More specifically, we are presently moving towards the creation of a jointly-appointed post-doctoral position to facilitate future collaboration. We will need to work closely with the Office of the Vice Provost to guarantee the best possible relationship with IBM.
Closely related to the projects we have been discussing with IBM is the data sonification research we have planned. We plan to put together a 'consortium' of sorts, consisting of our colleagues in other Departments interested in this work (Steve Feiner in CS, Claude Ghez at the Medical Center, Gautam Dasgupta in Engineering, etc.) along with external partners (IBM, the National Center for Supercomputing Activities, Microsoft, Intel) to secure extended support for this research. NCSA and IBM have both expressed strong interest, and our recent contacts with Intel and Microsoft suggest that they will also be willing to participate with us. Professors Garton and Dasgupta are currently drafting a grant application to the NSF with a significant data sonification component.
We have been discussing several new program initiatives with our colleagues at The Julliard School -- they desire to work with us in developing new musical performance interfaces. We plan to exploit this relationship to gain new understandings of how music/performance works, and to apply this knowledge to the creation of new artistic works as well as the creation of new pedagogical approaches. This is closely related to other fundraising projects we have initiated, and our goal is to use the Julliard relationship to enhance these projects and attract additional support.
As described in the Projects section, we believe that an exceptional fundraising opportunity exists for enhancing the acoustics of Miller Theater using groundbreaking new technologies. We expect that this long-term project will provide us with a unique resource for expanding musical and performance boundaries, with associated educational benefits. Professor Garton will be travelling to Japan in Fall, 1999 to solidify commitments from several Japanese corporations and research institutions. These commitments will be used to attract additional participation from US corporations, with the ultimate goal being the establishment of a strong technology and funding base for the project.
Following the 1999 Interactive Arts Technology Festival, we are aggressively courting the corporate sponsors of the event to attract additional support for Music Department activities. The success of the Festival has placed us in good position to present our case for continued sponsorship. At present, we have not narrowed the type of support we are seeking; we instead desire to find the forms of collaboration that may work best to further our own objectives. (Corporate sponsors are listed on the 1999 Interactive Arts Technology Festival web page.)
The CMC recording facility also presents an interesting set of fundraising possibilities. Because our location in New York gives us easy access to a large (and rapidly-expanding) media production market, we can use our recording operation to attract funding for innovative new methodologies. The attractiveness of Columbia will be predicated upon our ability to meld both content and technique, as well as our position as an academic research institution allowing us the freedom to experiment with technology in ways that more market-directed operations cannot.
We also have several private funders who are quite interested in our recording studio. We will be working closely with UDAR to develop these relationships.
Finally, the CMC has built a solid reputation for doing audio archive/preservation work. Janet Gertz (Columbia University Libraries) has identified a number of fundraising opportunities that would capitalize upon this reputation -- we have over $300,000 in grants submitted by Gertz and Garton pending, with high expectations that we will be receiving this support. There is an acute need for this preservation work, and we believe that additional opportunities for doing preservation and investigating the enhancement of older audio recordings will be plentiful.

To be sure, much of what we seek in the current funding request is "one-shot" investment intended to spark the engine of innovation within the Department. However, there are a few on-going commitments that will be essential to the long-term success of this endeavor. The following is a component-by-component speculative description of how funding for our initiatives might continue. This speculation is based upon our "larger" proposal, with all the components in place (including the Senior Faculty position). The current funding request does not address the totality of this vision, as we expect to be able to install the missing components within the next several years. As described below, we feel that all of the components are necessary to achieve a self-sustaining status, and we cannot guarantee that our fundraising will be adequate to meet the continuation of our vision without the solid base we imagine.

Senior Faculty Position

This particular component is a rather special case in that we do not know the mechanisms employed by the University to establish a faculty line like this. However, we believe that the eventual creation of this position is essential in achieving our total funding objectives. The potential for external income from data sonification research and "high-end" content/application development is quite high, but we will need a magnet individual who can tap the funding sources as they become available. Many of the projects we have described can generate substantial income, but we need the guidance and expertise that would come with the senior position to ensure project viability. Drawing upon the resources we will have in place and the extant audio talent at Columbia, we will be able to attract continued funding for audio technology work. We know that significant monies for audio technology, especially data auralization, will be available soon. A Senior Faculty appointment specializing in this area will be key to accessing these funding sources. The Senior Faculty position can also coordinate the high-end research performed by graduate student fellows and post-doctoral appointees.

Our belief is that the potential income accruing from a senior faculty line great enough to justify the investment by the University (to say nothing of the more intangible but vital knowledge resource to be gained).

Graduate Student Fellowships

We expect that funding for the fellowships can be picked up by specific grant income sources. This also reflects how we would like for the graduate student fellows to function in our development scheme: they will be working on focused projects and research to create new and unique uses of audio technologies.

Post-doctoral Fellowship

Our hope is to attract external foundation support for this position. We want to maintain enough flexibility in the fellowship to allow us to identify young music/audio researchers with particular skills, thus enabling us to attract emerging talents in "growth areas" of research.

Technology Liaison

We anticipate phasing out this position after the initial three-year period. If the Technology Liaison works as we intend, then Music Faculty will have a clear idea of how best to use the current technology, and (more importantly) the resources available to them within the University. Obviously if this position becomes a source for spawning lucrative projects, we will rethink whether or not we should terminate it.

System Administrator

This position will play an increasingly vital role as technology becomes central to the activities of the Department. We will begin exploring immediately with David Cohen's office how a reallocation of resources within Arts and Sciences may be used to cover the on-going salary of this position in years to come. Again, we are unclear exactly how this might occur; perhaps a shift to defining the System Administrator as an AcIS employee is the best route to guaranteeing the longevity of this necessary position.

Hardware

Nearly all of the hardware investment will be of a "one-shot"/start-up nature. However, we recognize that this investment will have to be renewed. Our goal is to continue the increase in the CMC budget beyond the three-year period and tap into this source of funding to maintain our installed base of machinery. Coupled with support arising from external grants for specific projects and often specific hardware, or with equipment grants from hardware manufacturers, we believe that we will be able to keep the Music Department at the forefront of technology into the foreseeable future.

Conference

By the end of the third year, we anticipate that we will have a significant body of data auralization work to present, and we want to establish Columbia as the world leader in this area. We will seek corporate or governmental sponsorship for an annual conference on the application of digital audio in various research fields. We expect to continue this conference annually through outside funding. Our expectation is reasonable, as we have enjoyed considerable success in conference organization and sponsorship in the past (for example, see the corporate sponsor list of the 1999 Interactive Arts Technology Festival we are hosting, as well as the 1997 International Computer Music Conference [total budget in excess of $500,000]).

Networking

As this component mainly reflects the cost of a high-speed link to the Prentis building, our hope is that this may be picked up as part of the general network budget of the University (there are other tenants in Prentis that are sharing our current T1 link, which we are funding from the CMC budget). If indeed Prentis is seen as an area for future project expansion (see the Future section), then it will be vital to maintain a solid data link to the internet. We also anticipate that networking costs will reduce as new technologies (such as cable-modem, for example) are put into place in New York City.

Computer Music Center Budget

The CMC will be a focal point for much of the activity generated by this proposal, and as such it will also act as a locus for future fundraising. As outlined above, we will be aggressive in pursuing grants and sponsorship for various projects. We expect that most of the administrative costs included in the proposal (the bulk of the CMC budget increase) can be picked up through fringe recovery charged to new grants.

Certain aspects of Center activities may also become independent sources of funds (such as the technology we can offer to the greater New York media market through our digital recording facility). We also intend to create a context at the CMC designed to facilitate the success of our fundraising activities, which will simultaneously lay the groundwork for our future plans.

This "context for the future" is perhaps one of the most exciting aspects of our proposal. We will of course be pursuing a traditional mix of fundraising sources (as described above), but we see a great opportunity in building a new type of 'lab' -- an engaging and supportive environment with a blend of features aimed at nurturing technology-based content creation. The key focus is the use of appropriate technology, and co-development of technology in the service of content. Most extant "media labs" are tied to development of hardware/software, often at the expense of the material that the hardware/software is intended to project. These ventures fall prey to the "demo syndrome" -- a flashy but short demonstration with no real future growth -- because little attention is given to content that can further expand the technology.

The environment or 'lab' we envision as the CMC would lend itself to a new kind of integrated technology and content development; this is what is needed for research in data auralization and the realization of the projects we have outlined as possible within the Music Department. We have the unique expertise at Columbia to do this, and our position in New York City gives us access to unprecedented opportunity in this area.

To make the most of this confluence of knowledge and circumstance, we will be working closely with Anne Kirschner and the new Columbia Media Enterprises, and other established Columbia resources (UDAR, CIE). We will also want to create a "Board of Advisors" -- a corporate advisory board for the CMC, consisting of representatives from the media industry and related production facilities based in New York. In addition to the traditional fundraising role of an advisory board, however, we will rely upon the board to assist us in designing and undertaking new, cooperative content/technology development projects. Our optimism in attracting external funding to continue the growth of the CMC (and indeed of this entire proposal) is predicated upon the intensely growing need for the knowledge and abilities that we possess.