The Team As A Whole
All team members bring unique and valuable experiences from a variety of disciplines that will help in the successful completion of this project. All team members are familiar with many of the methods described above, but in the event that one or more team members are not familiar with a method there is an opportunity to depart knowledge to one another that will contribute to everyone’s personal, professional, and academic growth.
Jonathan Cohen
School of Information, MSI in Human-Computer Interaction and Social Computing
Jon’s interest in music composition started in high school, with two years of coursework in a MIDI lab. He received a small college scholarship for an original classical music piece. While pursuing a B.A. in Comparative Literature at Binghamton University in New York, he enrolled in courses about classical music history and music theory, and spent a summer interning at EarGoo Recording Studio in Manhattan. Along the way he taught himself how to use music composition and multitracking software such as FL Studio, ProTools, and Cool Edit Pro.
The first job Jon loved after graduating college was with SiteAdvisor, a 15-person web security startup that pioneered testing web sites for social engineering threats. Less than three months after his first day, McAfee acquired SiteAdvisor and within 18 months their software reached 100,000,000 downloads. Jon researched and wrote blog articles about web safety threats, provided customer support, and mediated over 1,000 legal threats from angry web site owners. In the six months before starting graduate school, Jon transitioned out of full-time work to part-time work and telecommuted from Los Angeles while writing screenplay coverage and working as a production assistant at Sony and Fox.
Jacek Spiewla
School of Information, MSI in Human-Computer Interaction
Jacek Spiewla has a BS in Electrical Engineering from Michigan Technological University (MTU). During his freshman year of college, Jacek began to compose electronic music and publish it to his website, and continues to do both hobbies today. After graduating from MTU, he worked as an audio engineer for Nissan, where he honed his testing skills in audio quality on Bluetooth hands-free telephone systems. He also greatly enjoyed working on usability studies and testing navigation, text-to-speech, and voice recognition systems.
Today, Jacek works as a Digital Signal Processing (DSP) software validation engineer at Cambridge Silicon Radio. In his job, he ensures that the embedded software that runs on Bluetooth chips, particularly audio processing software, passes audio quality and functionality tests before consumers use it in Bluetooth headsets, cell phones and other wireless audio devices. He also develops unique test software used to evaluate audio quality.
Jacek is pursuing Human-Computer Interaction at SI because he is interested in creating innovative user experiences through user interface design for stand-alone applications and web pages. He has a research interest in digital music archives and developing rich interfaces for educational software.
Adam Torres
School of Information, MSI in Human-Computer Interaction
Adam has a BS in Psychology and an extensive research background that will help the team conduct the research it needs to create a well-informed iPhone application. He is also a 2nd year Masters student in the School of Information studying Human-Computer Interaction. He has gained experience in developing and evaluating user interfaces through numerous projects and work settings.
In addition to his academic experience, Adam started a mobile phone application company along with two other graduate students called Troubadour Mobile. Troubadour Mobile was backed by a local venture capital firm and focuses on developing location-aware applications for iPhone. His experience in developing interfaces for iPhone and mobile devices will play an integral part during the design phase. Adam also has extensive web and graphic design experience, as well as web development experience, from previous work settings that will play a large role in developing the user interface.
For more information about Adam’s current and past projects and work experience, please visit his online portfolio at http://www.adamatorres.com.
David Fienup
School of Music, Theater and Dance, MA Media Arts
David Fienup has a BA in Music Performance from Albion College, with a minor in Economics & Management, and a concentration on music composition. He spent two summers composing music for Albion College’s FURSCA program (Foundation for Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activities). He is currently working on a Master of Arts in Media Arts, specifically Sound Production for Music and Film. David was a member of the 2008 GROCS project Noteworks, which created a music composition program that challenged traditional composition using temporal networks.
David has a background in music theory, philosophy, and history. He has an interest in the way humans perceive sound emotionally and psychologically. In addition he is familiar with several audio sequencing and editing programs including ProTools, Digital Performer, Final Cut, Soundtrack, Logic, Max/MSP, Peak, SoundHack, CSound, and Kontakt. His broad knowledge of music and sound’s interaction with people will be an asset to this project. Sound engineering, music production, and electronic music have been a focus for David for the last several years, and he currently works on projects for Block M Records, and M-agination Films.
Collaborative music has been a basis of education for David. He has studied collaborative improvisation and performance through jazz, blues, “noise music”, rock, and “jamming”. While attending Albion College, several of the groups he worked with were 100% collaborative improvisation based including Sinful 3, and Sisrahtac. He has also been in several rock bands where he collaborated on writing and performing songs.
David hopes to learn more about the potential for collaborative music software, and is interested in how “beginner” musicians could interact with one another through a simple digital application.