The Music Engineering Art Project (MEAP) at Columbia University
MEAP is a collaboration between LabROSA in the Electrical Engineering department and the Computer Music Center in the Music Department, both at Columbia. When we realised the great overlap in our interests and approach to working with sound and technology, we looked for a way to collaborate more closely. A grant from Columbia's Academic Quality Fund has allowed us to work together since January 2005. Mostly this takes the form of weekly meetings of a dozen or so researchers drawn from various backgrounds and departments around the university.
Our general goal is to create interesting sound art installations that take full advantage of the range of skills in the group. This is interpreted as broadly as possible; as of summer 2006, our immediate goal is the development and release of a software environment for rearranging and intermixing snippets automatically selected from original recordings - an automatic mashup creator we call MeapSoft.