Academic

I am a seventh-year student in the CMU Computer Science program, with the Computer Music group.

My thesis work is in the area of languages for music and audio programming. Existing high-level music languages (Music-N family, Nyquist, Supercollider) are restrictive; a new algorithm generally can't be written natively, but only as a "unit generator", a black box whose internals are written in a low-level language such as C. I am aiming to do away with unit generators.

I see a common weakness in these HLLs: their type system. So I propose temporal type constructors. These are a way of building data types with time structure, and also a way of taking them apart to manipulate. For an introduction to the idea and an implementation, read the ICMC 2000 and 2001 papers. In a few examples, code with temporal type constructors is roughly a factor of five shorter than its low-level equivalent. More importantly, it's clearer and a better reflection of the algorithm.

Eventually, I'd like to see temporal type constructors in a solid non-research implementation. It may or may not ever rival C in performance, but even a slower system would blow Matlab out of the water for design and prototyping.

Resume in ASCII, PDF, or PostScript.

Published papers:

Refereed Conferences

• Eli Brandt, "Implementing temporal type constructors for music programming.", Proc. 2001 International Computer Music Conference, International Computer Music Association, pp. 99-102.
• Eli Brandt, "Hard sync without aliasing.", Proc. 2001 International Computer Music Conference, International Computer Music Association, pp. 365-368.
• James Wright and Eli Brandt, "System-level MIDI performance testing.", Proc. 2001 International Computer Music Conference, International Computer Music Association, pp. 318-321.
• Eli Brandt, "Temporal type constructors for computer music programming.", Proc. 2000 International Computer Music Conference, International Computer Music Association, pp. 328-331.
• Brandt and Dannenberg, "Time in distributed real-time systems", Proc. 1999 International Computer Music Conference, International Computer Music Association, (October 1999), pp. 523­526.
• Brandt and Dannenberg, "Low-latency music software using off-the-shelf operating systems", Proc. 1998 International Computer Music Conference, International Computer Music Association, (October 1998), pp. 137-141.
• Dannenberg and Brandt, "A Flexible Real-Time Software Synthesis System", Proc. 1996 International Computer Music Conference, International Computer Music Association, (August 1996), pp. 270-273.

Journals

• R. Libeskind-Hadas and E. Brandt, "Origin-Based Fault-Tolerant Routing in the Mesh", Future Generation Computer Systems, Vol. 11, No. 6, October 1995, pp. 603-615.
  Originally published in Proc. 1995 International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA '95), January 1995, Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, pp. 102-111.)