Engineering and Music: A Powerful Duet for Art and Science - Science Nation

University of Rochester electrical engineer Mark Bocko has combined his passion for music with his passion for engineering, devising a way to digitally reproduce music in files 1,000 times smaller than an mp3! But along with this new type of compression, Bocko's team of engineers and musicians at Rochester's Eastman School of Music are also helping uncover some extraordinarily precise details about just how music is made. With support from the National Science Foundation, they have built a computer model of the clarinet, entirely from real world acoustical measurements taken from human musicians. Measuring such things as how hard the musician is blowing into the instrument and the pressure the musician applies to the reed, they have modeled the way music is made. Their work could evolve into a cool new tool for music teachers and help create more expressive, more emotional computer generated musical sounds.