Narayan Sankaran

Berkeley, CA (USA)
Role(s):
Associate/Staff

Center of Music Production and Society

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Location: Bay Area
Industry: Education
Year Founded: 2011
Number Employees: 1-10 people
Business Stage: Creation/Idea
Entity Type: Nonprofit Corporation
Description: COMPAS ⎋ Center of Music Production and Society Music • Technology • Service Music has played an important role in San Francisco culture for the last 150 years. From the Gold Rush to Silicon Valley, music has shaped the community, just as the community has shaped the music. Technology is an important if under told part of this story. Music creation, performance, and consumption are all shaped by changes in technology. Technology is changing how we make and use music and San Francisco has been at the center of those technological innovations especially over the last fifty years. COMPAS has two interrelated objectives: 1) To educate San Francisco’s underserved demographic in the technological aspects of music making so that they may create and compete in the world of digital music production. 2) To analyze and celebrate the history of the interaction between music and technology. COMPAS will offer classes for undergraduate and graduate students to study how music, technology and society are connected. These classes might include a course on songwriters as public intellectuals or a history of technology and popular music in the Bay Area. Classes will also focus on applied music creation applications and train the student in both operation and teaching the pedagogy necessary to implement the COMPAS community service program. COMPAS will work with middle and high school students from a variety of San Francisco communities to prepare them to make music in this digital environment. COMPAS guides the delivery of these programs as well as the ethnographies created by the program leaders as part of their academic work. COMPAS will also engage in the development of interactive museum installations related to live music production and technology as well as exhibits of local music histories. Museum goers may be able to create music from virtual building blocks that mirror contemporary music construction techniques and provide instantaneous (and fun) live music To achieve these goals, the program founders have identified a variety of potential partners, including Northwestern University’s San Francisco Field Study, Blue Bear School of Music in San Francisco, the San Francisco History Museum, SF Performing Arts Library and Museum (PALM), the BECA program at San Francisco State University and The Center for New Music and Audio Technology at UC Berkeley (CNMAT). Leadership Dan Lewis, Steve Savage and Michael Kramer will plan and execute PMTS. Together, these educators and practitioners offer a depth of experience in the musical, cultural and pedagogical practices needed to best implement this program. Dan A. Lewis has been a professor of Human Development and Social Policy for more than thirty years. He has written extensively on urban problems. His latest book charts the progress of welfare reform in Illinois. He has also written on crime, education and mental health issues. For the last 15 years he has directed the San Francisco Field Study Program, which places students in the city’s government and civic organizations. He was recently appointed director of the Center for Civic Engagement at Northwestern University. Steve Savage is an active record producer and recording engineer. Albums on which he was the primary engineer have been nominated for 7 Grammy awards. Steve is a lecturer in musicology and recording arts at San Francisco State University and Los Medanos College. His most recent books are The Art of Digital Audio Recording from Oxford University Press and Bytes & Backbeats: Repurposing Music in the Digital Age for The University of Michigan Press. Steve is a founder and board president of Blue Bear School of Music in San Francisco and a former Chapter President and National Trustee of the San Francisco Chapter of the Recording Academy (the Grammy organization). Michael J. Kramer is a professor of American history at Northwestern University. He specializes in 20th-century cultural and intellectual history, with a focus on music, popular culture, and questions of citizenship and the public sphere. He is currently completing a book for Oxford University Press entitled Everybody Get Together: The Civics of Rock Music in San Francisco and Vietnam and the Making of the Sixties Counterculture. He has published essays on the history of rock criticism, the history of rock music festivals, and the place of cultural history in the interdisciplinary study of popular music.