Episode 3: Play Us a Song, You’re the Piano Brain

What a show we have for you this week! Join us as we tour the famed Steinway & Sons piano factory to learn how UConn is becoming a “Steinway school,” and what that means for our School of Fine Arts. We also talk to Erika Skoe, assistant professor of speech, language, and hearing sciences, and graduate student Parker Tichko about how and why they started their Neural Symphony project and created a “brain piano.” Special thanks to Tichko for letting us use the great demos he composed of the Game of Thrones theme song, Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” and the UConn Fight Song, and to Lovely Music for the clip of Alvin Lucier’s “Music for Solo Performer.” Visit the Skoe Lab website to download the Neural Symphony library for your own compositions and to watch a jazz trio improvise with the novel instrument.  Finally, we sit down with Barry Berman ’72 to talk about the time he and a fellow student created a fictional character who somehow became the most popular politician on campus. If you miss this one, you have only yourself to blame!