Tina Tallon

🤫🤫🤫🤫🤫

(I don’t know if he would remember this, but I very briefly dated Beau’s roommate back at Harvard; we all had Christmas together one year 😂 2019, I think? Good god, I can’t believe I just put that in writing on the internet)

When I asked him to be on my committee, I noted my interest in the 2013 Sievers et. al. PNAS paper, and he very humbly said: “I’m just one of four authors on that paper, and, in all honesty, not the main author at all (Beau Sievers did the lion’s share of the work, and emerged from Thalia’s lab).”

Oh man, Larry Polansky was another truly wonderful human as well as composer and scholar. He was on my PhD committee until UCSD changed the committee makeup guidelines about what constituted an “external” member (basically, external to the field, not external to the institution, as it was pre2017).

Anyway, the tl;dr: it is an enormous privilege to be able to teach David Huron’s work (and at OSU, of all places), and I want to encourage everyone to check it out. Not only was he an incredible artist & researcher, but he was also generous with his time and insights - even in retirement and illness

I promised to do a weekly share of some of the materials we’re engaging with in my course, but this feels like it deserves its own shout-out: If you’ve never read David’s 2006 book, “Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation,” please go do so ASAP. It legit changed my life.

So today, as we reviewed the syllabus, one of the music theory grad students saw that we’d start reading “Sweet Anticipation” this week and let out a reverent “awww.” The others had never heard of his work, so I realized I needed to add context. I started trying to describe it, and got choked up.

I owe so many elements of my career (including the current configuration of my job - salary, research funding, facilities, recruitment strategies) to him. And again, he responded to my email *within 24 hours.* (If I was retired, I would never check my email ever again 😂)

I’m always shy about telling my heroes how much their work means to me, so I tried to be chill, but eventually, I also sheepishly told him how his work influenced my decision to switch from bioengineering to composition/music research, and how surreal it was to end up inheriting his lab at OSU.

Despite having been retired for almost 5 years, he responded within 24 hours with an incredibly detailed accounting of everything, as well as a list of other people to contact for more recent perspectives. (He also gave me pointers about negotiation.)

While I was weighing the offer and negotiating, I mustered the courage to email him about lab specs (experimental setups, sound isolaton booths, etc), as well as any insights about how to carry out interdisciplinary work in collaboration with other depts on campus (psych, speech & hearing, etc)

When I got the job offer in 2024, part of the offer was his old Music Research Lab facilities. I never got the chance to tour them in person because they didn’t anticipate my work would overlap until my campus visit (it was a straight-ahead composition job, and they didn’t expect a researcher)

He was a juggernaut in music cognition and computational music studies, and had an enormous impact on so many peoples’ lives - far more than I can ever claim. But I do want to share one story (and perhaps one of the last where he was able to support a junior scholar in the most generous of ways):

His work on musical expectancy was paradigm-shifting for me as a young composer (and especially one who got the chance to work with music21 (which was largely inspired by Humdrum) in its very early stages), and knowing that he was at OSU was a huge part of the reason I applied for the job in 2023.

As I’ve done for the past four years, I’m teaching David Huron’s work in my AI & Music course this week (we engage with his work frequently during the course), and I actually got unexpectedly emotional introducing it now that he has passed.

My syllabi are updated, my Canvas pages are made…this is the most ready I’ve ever been for a semester. After teaching in higher ed for 8yrs (4 on the adjunct circuit, 4 in tt jobs), this is the first semester where I haven’t had to deliver at least 1 completely new or heavily re-written course.

Hahahahaha omg, so kikified; if boubafication was intended to make things less stressful, that was definitely exemplary of kikification (although tbh, I’m not mad about having an extra 48hrs to refine things)!

About to upgrade the OS on my computer and consequently need to back up my hard drive; this is a PSA to back up your computer if you haven’t done it in a while!

Thanks! It’s been a breath of fresh air for me and a very good “practice what you preach” moment…to an extent (it wouldn’t have happened if there was a score required for submission, because notating this is going to be a dumpster fire 😂)

Anyway, this is all admittedly pretty banal, but it does feel significant to be composing a new (non-installation) piece for the first time in a hot second, and I’m actually quite happy with how it’s going thus far!

(Also, it means that in order to get the raw materials they need to mock it up in a DAW, they often have to talk to performers for any instruments they don’t play. Turns out this is often the hardest part of the process 😂 (thankfully I have a viola right here so no problem))

(This is something that I encourage any students whose music focuses on timbre/gesture as a primary mode of discourse to do quite often to encourage them to arrange materials freely and without an imposed 4/4 q=60 grid, but honestly? My training was quite structuralist and I rarely do it myself.)

Two things that have been freeing: 1) sure, I won’t be winning awards for playing Bach any time soon, but I have grown very confident in my improvisatory abilities in line with my aesthetic preferences, and 2) honestly, working with my raw audio in a DAW prior to notating has been A+++.

A wine glass with red wine in front of a computer screen showing audio waveforms

Because I challenged myself to write this on a very short timeline (~1wk) and the adjudication reqs are loosey goosey (either a score, recording, or both - and you know they’re only listening) I’m recording raw materials into Logic, running them through Pd, and then sandboxing. I’ll notate it later.

I’m submitting it to ICMC (the International Computer Music Conference), which has a deadline of *checks notes*…tomorrow!…so anyway, violists, if you want a new piece, hit me up!

I ended up performing two other peoples’ viola+electronics pieces as a result (both of which thankfully involved quite a bit of improvisation, which is where I shine) and got quite a bit of surprisingly positive feedback, so I’ve decided to write another viola+live electronics piece.

I did, however, begin performing more over the past year. It began when I couldn’t find a performer for a viola+live elec piece of mine that got accepted to a conference, so I decided to do it myself (nb: I played violin for over a decade as a kid, but I am not a violist).

Because of the heft of my teaching duties (esp surrounding AI) and having to navigate two new tenure track jobs in the past four years, I haven’t actually written a ton of music in a hot second. I’ve vowed to change that this year.

(Btw it’s so much more than a “review of a decade of AI history;” that was merely one of the things that I was struck by!)

(The entire thing is fantastic, but for pedagogical purposes, I’d like to note that Chapter 4 gives a great primer on post-war AI research & culture, along with concise definitions of terms and concepts woven into the historical narrative. I’ll be assigning it for my AI & Music class this semester.)