Alex and Elaine's 2007 Year-in-Review

This year, we write from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Elaine is on sabbatical, and we are both Fellows at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and form a cluster on Analytical Listening through Interactive Visualization. Since arriving in Cambridge, Alex has begun a picture-a-day blog. This year's story and pictures unfold in reverse chronological order - it is a digital rewind of our year. Let your mouse hover over a picture to see its caption; click on it to see a larger version.
December did not disappoint; winter came early and the Bunting Quad, where we have our offices, is buried in two feet of snow; the Charles River starts to freeze. Effie (Elaine's sister), in Boston for a fellowship at Spaulding Hospital, visits us often on weekends. Our hopes of making snowballs on a trek around Fresh Pond are dashed by the dry snow. We spent Christmas eve with Elaine's cousins who are also in Boston for medical fellowships, Stanley, Chunlei and Shevonne, who puts her toy medical kit to good use. Highlight of the month is the arrival of Alex's xo laptop - you pay for two when you buy one, the second goes to a child in a developing country.
Steve and Marcus outdid themselves at the Thanksgiving dinner in November; guess who got a turkey drumstick? TK and Mary visited from Los Angeles, and TK and Elaine gave a Franco-Chinese concert at the Radcliffe Dean's residence. The Mt. Auburn Cemetery foliage were a feast for the eyes. Elaine checked in on her students and rehearsed with TK in Los Angeles, attended the Japan-America Frontiers of Engineering meeting (and gets an award) in Palo Alto, and gave talks at Stanford.
October's MIT Council for the Arts black-tie event at the Institute for Contemporary Art gave Alex a chance to wear his tuxedo; we met Elizabeth Diller, the ICA architect. Gege (Alex's sister) visited us, and we walked the loop trail around Walden Pond. An invitation from Radcliffe alum, Anna Nagurney, brought us out to UMass Amherst; the skies cleared the second day, and we could properly appreciate the shocking reds, oranges, and yellows of the peak foliage.
September ended with a trip to Vienna for the International Conference on Music Information Retrieval, and to Berlin-Köpenick for a planning meeting for the Kavli German-American Frontiers in Science Symposium. Arpi and Ching-Hua (Elaine's PhD students) present papers on music similarity and music expression analysis at ISMIR, and Gerhard Widmer takes us to the Bösendorfer showroom, where Elaine picks out her three favorite pianos from the two dozen or so on display.
Our stuff arrived in Cambridge from Los Angeles on orientation day, during introductions. We celebrated Dad's birthday and Mom and Dad's 40th wedding anniversary at East Ocean City in Boston's Chinatown. We took Mom and Dad to Buffalo for their anniversary, only to discover they got married in NYC, and the reception was in New Jersey. We saw Niagara Falls, the house where they lived, and the hospital where Elaine was born (which no longer handles births due to changing demographics).
In August, before moving to Cambridge, we took Mom and Dad to the Grand Teton (big tit) and the Yellowstone National Parks. At Yellowstone, Mom and Dad had a close encounter with four brown bears, who pawed at, and climbed on, the rental car with them in it. We were blissfully unaware of the bears and off on a hike.
As the summer drew to a close, there were many farewell parties with our friends, and we sold our beloved pumpkin. Much of July was spent in home repairs, preparing for the house rental; a hole was cut in the patio roof as it lost the battle with the rapidly expanding pine tree. Two summer interns joined the MuCoaCo lab, Jan Zheng (from UMBC, pictured with MuCoaCo PhD student Daniel) and Suranga Chandima Nanayakkara (from NUS).
In June, Elaine's grandmother passed away in her 92nd year; Elaine makes a memorial website for her. Before that, we were on a multi-city London-Delft-Paris-NYC trip for meetings. In London, we and Ching-Hua presented our research at the Computational Creativity Workshop at Goldsmiths University. Prior to that, Elaine participated in the program committee meeting in Delft for the ACM Multimedia Conference. We stopped in Paris to visit Gege (who shows off her new car) and Papa.
Alex was an invited speaker at a symposium on new paradigms for computer music at IRCAM, and at a panel chaired by Gérard Assayag. In spite of sightings of us at the crèpe Place du Châtelet, Beaubourg Crèperie and Berthillon's ice cream, no, we were not eating too much.
The first stop of this multi-city journey was NYC, where we present a poster on MIMI, and Elaine had too much fun with the water (musical) organ; we visited with Wilson and Ming. In May, Todd Cochran and Bob Watt threw one of their musical soirées; a highlight of the evening was a duet between Hubert Laws, superb classical and jazz flutist, and Carl Vincent, whose sense of timing is uncanny. Days before, Elaine performed Poulenc's Sextour with John Petring and Albuquerque artists in Jemez Springs.
While at the Hummingbird Music Camp in Jemez Spring, we took a side trip to Santa Fe. Before that, the Society for Mathematics and Computation in Music held our inaugural conference at the Berlin Musical Instrument Museum. Apart from presentating papers, Elaine played Ivan Tcherepnin's Fêtes in honor of Guerino Mazzola's 60th birthday, and MIMI made her international debut on the 1950s Seiler piano, the first MIDI piano. Two more firsts: we hooded MuCoaCo PhD graduates Arpi and Jie.
The day before, Elaine's promotion lunch took place in the elegant Patina restaurant at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. April brought several visitors: Kim Peu and Lily (Elaine's uncle and aunt), whom we took to the Huntington Gardens, and Julia Ogrydziak (music friend from MIT), whom we took to TK and Mary's for chamber music.
We got the call from Judith Vichniac at Radcliffe about our fellowships, and Alex bought a pair of shoes in Radcliffe colors, which he showed off over crèpes to Denise and Lucas. Domestic activities included making laksa with the magic Prima packs from Auntie Koon, and painting our plant stands lime green. The month began with our first seder at Karen and Marcus' with Judith and Fritz, and an email from Dean Yortsos telling Elaine that she was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure.
We were in Singapore over Spring break in March to see Ah Ma (Elaine's grandma), and to participate in the NUS Techno-Arts Festival. Elaine gave her third The Mathematics in Music concert-conversation, and we set up an ESP booth. Alex and Vincent (Elaine's brother) shared a birthday celebration. The second Math-Music concert was at the U. of Victoria in February. Elaine stayed at the Empress hotel, complete with Red Hat Society ladies at high tea, across from the Royal B.C. Museum.
The concert and talks at UVic were organized by George Tzanetakis, and part of the Women Scholars Lecture Series. By now, Gilles and Annie Clavel, Alex's CS Prof. from the Institut National Agronomique, had settled in nicely at Long Beach, and we visited them at their new home. Other events that month included the horn quartet concerto by Bob Watt and friends, which we attended with Todd and Jadon, at the Wilshire United Methodist Church, across from the Scottish Rite Masonic Temple.
January is a wonderful time to visit the Desert Garden at the Huntington. Our potted camelia was in full bloom. The first Mathematics-Music concert took place at USC as part of the Provost's Arts and Humanities Initiative; the hall was packed, and people were turned away. The flowers from the Viterbi Dean were the most splendid we had ever seen; and, Elaine celebrated her birthday. Earlier that month, we met Paula and Frank (Alex's dad's cousins) from San Diego, and celebrated Bob's birthday.
The year began with a trip to New Orleans for the Special Sessions on Mathematical Techniques in Musical Analysis at the Joint Mathematics Meeting. We enjoyed the Rose Parade with several colleagues and Gilles and Annie: the guy with his back to the camera is George Lucas, this year's Grand Marshall, and yes, those are storm troopers. We drank a toast to the new year with Pauline, David & Kristin, and Karen & Dave at the stroke of midnight January 1st.

We want to thank our friends and family for yet another unbelievably packed, fun, and beautiful year. We wish you a very happy new year!

Elaine & Alex December 25, 2007