Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) played host to the March meeting for the San Francisco chapter. The event was billed as a tour of the facilities which have been renovated due to earthquake damage mainly to the third floor.

The first stop was the Stage on the third floor where the 45 attendees were treated to Mark Applebaum's 8-channel piece entitled Precomposition. The room is the new home of CCRMA's concert series.

Attendees then assembled into a new main floor lecture room in which Jay Kadis, audio engineer/lecturer, presented slides that showed the history of the building as well as scenes during reconstruction.

Dr. Chris Chafe, CCRMA Director, followed up with a discussion of CCRMA's research on using Internet2 to connect musicians playing together in different geographic locations. Based on empirical studies, he noted that at latencies in the 40-100 millisecond range, musicians have difficulty preventing the song tempo from slowing down.

Latencies under 40 milliseconds hold promise for ensemble network performances. Chafe mentioned that the next step of this research will be to try to understand musician's abilities to overcome latency problems.

Things became a little more chaotic as the crowd was split into smaller groups and led on tours to other parts of the building.

Sasha Leitman, Acting Technical Director, and Chryssie Nanou, pianist and Artistic Coordinator, showed off one of the 40 noiseless Zalman TNN 500AF heat sink PC cases.

We interrupted a practice session of a Stanford a cappella group in one of the basement studios while Jay Kadis inventoried the equipment in the control room next door.

Another stop was the Listening Room, a surround sound studio nicknamed the BBQ room because of the metal grill positioned over speakers sunk further into the floor. People were invited to sit in chairs in the middle of the room to experience a multi-channel piece.

We also circled through a lab where Max Mathews' Radio Baton was spotted tucked away in a shelf. Newer musical interfaces included a 3-laser (string) harp and a blue two-joystick device. No one was sure how the balance device worked, though we did understand the accelerometer at the fulcrum was involved.

Attendees posed interesting questions throughout the tour and discussions continued well past the scheduled program.