Hidden Musicians: Code Composer

Josh Coronado does not consider himself a musician. He doesn’t like to think of himself as an artist either. “I didn’t like art or the idea of art for the longest time. It can be parodied—being weird just to be weird. It wasn’t until I found an emotional connection that I got interested,” Coronado said.

Beyond his own reservations about labeling what he does, Coronado defies categorization. He will be wrapping up his undergraduate career as a Biology major this spring as he continues his coterm in Music, Science, and Technology into the next school year.

Coronado was introduced to computer music when he took a class fall quarter at the Knoll, home to the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA, pronounced ‘karma’). The work being done at CCRMA is located somewhere between engineering, computer science, and music. After spending a year taking classes and recording music in this Spanish Gothic fortress atop a hill near Lake Lag, Coronado is clearly at home, leading me up and down winding staircases and casually mentioning the place’s eccentricities. “This is the Max lab,” he said of one space where students, researchers, and professors can make their own musical instruments in order to create experimental sound. “It’s named for Max. No one knows his last name.”

Computer music is a recent development for Coronado. He has played the Tahitian drums for 18 years. Growing up in Las Vegas, it was a way to connect to his mother’s culture, and he was forced to sit through his sister’s hula dance practices either way.  Coronado ended up forming his own dance and music group in high school that opened for Jimmy Buffett. Even so, the drumming and dancing he has known his entire life is not an art form because it is so heavily commercialized. He has performed, he says, at one too many touristy luaus.

Coronado stopped playing when he got to Stanford and only recently has music reentered his life in a serious way. His drumming background influences his composition, his rhythms influenced by the sonic interactions and structures of Tahitian drumming as well as his interest in electronic dance music. He is also a member of indie rock band Sex Couch. They just recorded their first demo and had, quite appropriately, a Couchwarming Party.

The Knoll was originally built to be the home of Stanford President Ray Lyman Wilbur in 1915. It became home to the Music Department in 1946. In 1986, CCRMA took over. After undergoing renovations in 2004 and 2005, The Knoll is now equipped with state of the art recording studios, performance spaces, classrooms, offices, and one of the best kept secrets on the Stanford campus: the listening room. The carpeted walls muffle any extraneous sound and tables cluttered with cables, computers, and other equipment line the edges of the room. Down a few steps in the center of the room, a stool sits atop a metal grate. There are speakers (22 in all) positioned below the grate, suspended from the ceiling, and on all sides of the stool in order to create an utterly immersive sonic experience.

As we sat in the listening room, Coronado instructed me to sit in the stool. “I’m going to turn off the lights,” he said. “It creates the best listening experience.”  I was about to hear “Shapes,” a code piece he wrote fall quarter that was an artistic rendering of different sample sounds and pulse waves. 

It felt like I was submerged in sound—pulsating, electronic, insistent sound that I could feel moving around me as it transitioned between speakers. In the darkness the slow sirens and heartbeat-sounding rhythms created a physical sensation of indistinctness. The music sounded as if it were coming from inside my head. When asked about where the piece came from, Coronado’s assertion, “I just went with what I heard,” made perfect sense. It had an emotional, visceral clarity, a delight in the pure aesthetics of sound, and a desire for experimentation. And all this with a few lines of computer code.

Coronado’s next project is composing six different pieces that explore his experience with Tahitian drumming practices and contemplate the question, what does a drummer mean without a dancer? Supported by a Spark! grant, one piece is finished and he has ideas for several more, not all of which will be composed on a computer. He's also worked on a piece where he controls a piano from his computer and plays a duet with a violin.  

 “Compositions are thoughts and emotions I’ve had the chance to think all the way through,” he said. He hopes to make a living at composition and pursue music full time.