Academics
Spring 2023

Spring 2023

This list is updated regularly. Check back often for the latest updates. Email lara@berkeley.edu with suggestions.

Graduate courses:

NWMEDIA 200, 4 units

History & Theory of New Media

C. Wilmott

This graduate seminar is one of the core requirements for the Designated Emphasis in New Media, offered by the Berkeley Center for New Media. This course will provide participants with a foundation in new media studies (major works, authors, historical events, objects, and schools of thought), such that they will be able to compile reading lists for their qualifying exams, bibliographies for their dissertations, and syllabi for their courses on topics related to new media. It will develop participants' skills in analyzing new media texts and artifacts, articulating their insights in speech and writing, and developing individual new media research projects.


NWMEDIA C265, 3 units

(Also INFO C265)

Interface Aesthetics

K. Ryokai

This course will cover new interface metaphors beyond desktops (e.g., for mobile devices, computationally enhanced environments, tangible user interfaces) but will also cover visual design basics (e.g., color, layout, typography, iconography) so that we have systematic and critical understanding of aesthetically engaging interfaces. Students will get a hands-on learning experience on these topics through course projects, design critiques, and discussions, in addition to lectures and readings.


NWMEDIA 290, 4 units

Fandom & Piracy

A. De Kosnik

Fan studies grew out of scholarship on reception (the role of the reader/viewer/user in determining the meanings of media texts). Piracy studies emerged from scholarship on distribution (the operations of systems and technologies of media dissemination). The two fields have not often intersected, but in this seminar, we will ask how fandom and piracy intersect and overlap, especially for people of color, LGBTQIA people, and women. We will investigate how fandom and piracy provide valuable lenses on a range of contemporary phenomena and issues, such as radical care, performances of selfhood, inequities of information access, intergenerational conflicts, and collective vs. individual responsibility.


NWMEDIA 290, 3 units

Queering Digital Culture

E. Fraser

What does it mean to “Queer” digital culture, both as a retrospective, looking back, and as a present and future focus? Queering Digital Cultures reviews the Queer history of digital and new media, including well-documented communities and works and neglected or revised histories that have begun to feature in recent scholarship. Through Queering as both a conceptual framework and a mode of inquiry, students will consider early new media works; cyberspaces; online communities; fan cultures; video games, and other media as part of a process of ‘Queering’ digital culture. Students will analyse and interpret contemporary digital cultural practices using Queer theory, not only through LGBTQI+ themes but with a focus on the digital form itself.


NWMEDIA 290, 4 units

Digital Storytelling

E. Fraser

Through themes of crisis, catastrophe and speculative futures, this course introduces students to the history and practice of digital storytelling. Using theories like cybertext, procedurality and narratology the content covers established and recent scholarship on new media, video games, non-linear texts and digitality. Students will develop projects featuring interactivity, social media, machinima, podcasting, hypertext, StoryMaps and other natively digital forms and practices. Exploring ideas around crisis, ruin, dystopia and climate catastrophe, students will experiment with digital storytelling techniques to extend their work into fiction, creative non-fiction, and speculation. Introductory training and equipment available as required.


NWMEDIA 290, 4 units

Experimental Art Studio

A. Kazmi & J. Miller

Recent developments in creative technologies (such as augmented/virtual reality and artificial intelligence programs) have allowed artists to experiment in their studios in novel ways. How do we tell stories, question the status quo, envision alternative futures, or push boundaries using new programs, forms, or spatial understandings? How can new mediums inform the way we understand and produce works of art? How do we critically engage, subvert, and challenge the commercial industry model of new media production?

By utilizing research and experimentation with new tools and software programs, we will consider art making in relation to other more traditional media. This is not a technology class with a dash of art on the side. In this class, developing your artistic voice will be just as important as honing your technical skills. We will have a historical approach and we will look at new media art in an ongoing dialogue with sculpture, installation, film, video, sound art, and performance art. Students will be introduced to contemporary art projects by artists working in socially engaged forms, raising awareness and creating opportunities for conversation about our political and ecological realities.

While it is not necessary to have proficiency in specific software programs before taking this course, having some familiarity with creative tools is beneficial. Merging new and traditional mediums will be encouraged. Assignments include: using artificial intelligence programs to iterate on collaborative drawings, using Adobe Illustrator and a laser cutter to design and install an art intervention, and exploring spatial immersion and critical worldbuilding using virtual reality.

Students interested in enrolling MUST enroll in the waitlist AND fill in the application here: https://forms.gle/XrjN9X5xqo7S28oZA

ARCH 205B, 5 units

Studio One

Staff

This course is the second semester of a one-year, post-professional studio intended for those students who have a professional architecture degree and wish to explore current design issues in a stimulating, rigorous, and highly experimental studio setting.


ARCH 229, 1-4 units

Special Topics in Digital Design Theories and Methods

J. Ellis


COMPSCI 260A, 4 units

User Interface Design and Development

B. Hartmann

The design, implementation, and evaluation of user interfaces. User-centered design and task analysis. Conceptual models and interface metaphors. Usability inspection and evaluation methods. Analysis of user study data. Input methods (keyboard, pointing, touch, tangible) and input models. Visual design principles. Interface prototyping and implementation methodologies and tools. Students will develop a user interface for a specific task and target user group in teams.


COMPSCI C280, 3 units

Computer Vision

Staff

Paradigms for computational vision. Relation to human visual perception. Mathematical techniques for representing and reasoning, with curves, surfaces and volumes. Illumination and reflectance models. Color perception. Image segmentation and aggregation. Methods for bottom-up three dimensional shape recovery: Line drawing analysis, stereo, shading, motion, texture. Use of object models for prediction and recognition.


CYPLAN 255, 3 units

Urban Informatics and Visualization

Staff

A hands-on data visualization course that trains students to analyze urban data, develop indicators, and create visualizations and maps using programming languages, open source tools, and public data.


EDUC 203, 3 units

Cultivating Cognitive Development: From Sensorimotor Intelligence to Embodied STEM Concepts

L. Goldwasser

This Learning Sciences and Human Development graduate program required course provides a foundation for one strand of LS/HD scholarship: the sensorimotor grounding of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) concepts. We will cover seminal work from cognitive developmental psychology as well as a variety of theories of human learning, both of movement and of STEM concepts, that ultimately inform the design of artifacts and activities for equitable STEM learning.


EDUC 295B, 3 units

Technology, Computing, and Data in the Classroom

M. Wilkerson, T. Sengupta-Irving, T. Philip

To explore the cognitive consequences of technology in instruction and learning, the promise of technology in education will be examined, and exemplary instructional software will be explored. A model of knowledge acquisition and knowledge change incorporating technological delivery of instruction will be developed.


INFO 203, 2 units

Social Issues of Information

Staff

This course is designed to be an introduction to the topics and issues associated with information and information technology and its role in society. Throughout the semester we will consider both the consequence and impact of technologies on social groups and on social interaction and how society defines and shapes the technologies that are produced. Students will be exposed to a broad range of applied and practical problems, theoretical issues, as well as methods used in social scientific analysis. The four sections of the course are: 1) theories of technology in society, 2) information technology in workplaces 3) automation vs. humans, and 4) networked sociability.


INFO 205-001, 2 units

Information Law and Policy

Staff

This course uses examples from various commercial domains—retail, health, credit, entertainment, social media, and biosensing/quantified self—to explore legal and ethical issues including freedom of expression, privacy, research ethics, consumer protection, information and cybersecurity, and copyright. The class emphasizes how existing legal and policy frameworks constrain, inform, and enable the architecture, interfaces, data practices, and consumer facing policies and documentation of such offerings; and, fosters reflection on the ethical impact of information and communication technologies and the role of information professionals in legal and ethical work.


INFO 218, 3 units

Concepts of Information

Staff

As it's generally used, "information" is a collection of notions, rather than a single coherent concept. In this course, we'll examine conceptions of information based in information theory, philosophy, social science, economics, and history. Issues include: How compatible are these conceptions; can we talk about "information" in the abstract? What work do these various notions play in discussions of literacy, intellectual property, advertising, and the political process? And where does this leave "information studies" and "the information society"?


INFO 233, 3 units

Social Psychology and Information Technology

Staff

Discusses application of social psychological theory and research to information technologies and systems; we focus on sociological social psychology, which largely focuses on group processes, networks, and interpersonal relationships. Information technologies considered include software systems used on the internet such as social networks, email, and social games, as well as specific hardware technologies such as mobile devices, computers, wearables, and virtual/augmented reality devices. We examine human communication practices, through the lens of different social psychology theories, including: symbolic interaction, identity theories, social exchange theory, status construction theory, and social networks and social structure theory.


INFO 234, 3 Units

Information Technology Economics, Strategy, and Policy

Staff

Application of economic tools and principles, including game theory, industrial organization, information economics, and behavioral economics, to analyze business strategies and public policy issues surrounding information technologies and IT industries. Topics include: economics of information; economics of information goods, services, and platforms; strategic pricing; strategic complements and substitutes; competition models; network industry structure and telecommunications regulation; search and the "long tail"; network cascades and social epidemics; network formation and network structure; peer production and crowdsourcing; interdependent security and privacy.


INFO 247, 3 units

Information Visualization and Presentation

Staff

The design and presentation of digital information. Use of graphics, animation, sound, visualization software, and hypermedia in presenting information to the user. Methods of presenting complex information to enhance comprehension and analysis. Incorporation of visualization techniques into human-computer interfaces. Course must be completed for a letter grade to fulfill degree requirements.


INFO 259, 4 units

Natural Language Processing

Staff

This course introduces students to natural language processing and exposes them to the variety of methods available for reasoning about text in computational systems. NLP is deeply interdisciplinary, drawing on both linguistics and computer science, and helps drive much contemporary work in text analysis (as used in computational social science, the digital humanities, and computational journalism). We will focus on major algorithms used in NLP for various applications (part-of-speech tagging, parsing, coreference resolution, machine translation) and on the linguistic phenomena those algorithms attempt to model. Students will implement algorithms and create linguistically annotated data on which those algorithms depend.


JOURN 216, 2-3 units

Multimedia Reporting

Staff

For journalists, the World Wide Web opens a powerful way to tell stories by combining text, video, audio, still photos, graphics, and interactivity. Students learn multimedia-reporting basics, how the web is changing journalism, and its relationship to democracy and community. Students use storyboarding techniques to construct nonlinear stories; they research, report, edit, and assemble two story projects.


JOURN 220, 2 units

Coding for Journalists

J. Rue

This course is an introduction to programming concepts as they relate to the journalism industry. The goal of this course is to equip students with a foundational technical literacy to construct interactive online stories such as data visualizations, infographics, maps, multimedia packages, games or innumerable other types of projects students may conceive.


JOURN 222, 3 units

Interactive Narratives

R. Hernandez

This class teaches students how to develop interactive online news packages using best practices in design and web development. The course focuses on story structure and production of content and will cover the following topics:Best practices in developing interactive multimedia stories online; Design fundamentals and typography for online content; HTML and CSS for designing and constructing web projects; jQuery coding for adding interactivity to online content.


LDARCH 287, 3 units

Representation as Research: Contemporary Topics in Landscape Visualization

Staff

Representations typically demonstrate two different forms of landscape analysis—empirical data and personal perception/aesthetics—but landscape provides opportunities for their overlaps in order to advance and synthesize robust research. Through lectures, technical tutorials, and reading discussions, this course will profile contemporary landscape research practices and representational techniques. We will use visualization to advance landscape research, theory, and site analysis, focusing specifically on methods that tackle issues of temporality and ephemerality. We will generate original media that communicates spatial, ecological, and cultural complexities.


SCMATH 220C, 3 units

Instructional Design in Science and Mathematics Education

M. Linn

Survey of literature on design of instruction in science and mathematics, including development of computer-based instruction. Includes consideration of evaluation methods and development of instruction modules for topics in science and mathematics.


RHETORIC 250, 4 units

Rhetoric of the Image

W. Wong

A study of the visual image as a mode of discourse, together with an analysis of the terms in which images have been interpreted and criticized. Focus may be on the rhetoric of a particular image or set of images, or on more broadly theoretical writings about image.


VISSCI C280, 3 units

Computer Vision

Staff

Paradigms for computational vision. Relation to human visual perception. Mathematical techniques for representing and reasoning, with curves, surfaces and volumes. Illumination and reflectance models. Color perception. Image segmentation and aggregation. Methods for bottom-up three dimensional shape recovery: Line drawing analysis, stereo, shading, motion, texture. Use of object models for prediction and recognition.











Undergraduate courses:

NWMEDIA 290, 4 units

Experimental Art Studio

A. Kazmi & J. Miller

Recent developments in creative technologies (such as augmented/virtual reality and artificial intelligence programs) have allowed artists to experiment in their studios in novel ways. How do we tell stories, question the status quo, envision alternative futures, or push boundaries using new programs, forms, or spatial understandings? How can new mediums inform the way we understand and produce works of art? How do we critically engage, subvert, and challenge the commercial industry model of new media production?

By utilizing research and experimentation with new tools and software programs, we will consider art making in relation to other more traditional media. This is not a technology class with a dash of art on the side. In this class, developing your artistic voice will be just as important as honing your technical skills. We will have a historical approach and we will look at new media art in an ongoing dialogue with sculpture, installation, film, video, sound art, and performance art. Students will be introduced to contemporary art projects by artists working in socially engaged forms, raising awareness and creating opportunities for conversation about our political and ecological realities.

While it is not necessary to have proficiency in specific software programs before taking this course, having some familiarity with creative tools is beneficial. Merging new and traditional mediums will be encouraged. Assignments include: using artificial intelligence programs to iterate on collaborative drawings, using Adobe Illustrator and a laser cutter to design and install an art intervention, and exploring spatial immersion and critical worldbuilding using virtual reality.

Students interested in enrolling MUST enroll in the waitlist AND fill in the application here: https://forms.gle/XrjN9X5xqo7S28oZA

ARCH 11B, 5 units

Introduction to Design

Staff

This Introduction to design concepts and conventions of graphic representation and model building as related to the study of architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and city planning. Students draw in plan, section, elevation, axonometric, and perspective and are introduced to digital media. Design projects address concepts of order, site analysis, scale, structure, rhythm, detail, culture, and landscape.


ART 171-001, 4 units

Video Projects

Staff

This course develops more advanced technical and conceptual skills, with focused attention on the pre- and post-production practices of writing and production design as well as image and sound editing. Class meetings include technical workshops, studio work, individual and class critique, and discussion of readings and screened course materials. Course projects vary in focus depending upon instructor; areas of emphasis may include: video in performance practices; video for sculptural installation; and social activist video.


ART 172, 4 units

Advanced Digital Media: Computer Graphics

Staff

Computer Graphics constitute a default method of image synthesis, from fine art to game design, cinema, and advertising. This production-intensive studio course introduces students to professional CG tools (Blender, Python) as well as an overview of CG aesthetics. Weekly project assignments based on tutorials cover modeling, texturing, lighting, animation, rendering, physics simulations and data-driven image synthesis. Final projects focus on portfolio work with scenes and characters to be exported into VR, AR, and game design.


ART 178

Game Design Methods

Staff

This course offers an introduction to game design and game studies. Game studies has five core elements: the study of games as transmitters of culture, the study of play and interactivity, the study of games as symbolic systems; the study of games as artifacts; and methods for creating games. We will study these core elements through play, play tests, play analysis, and comparative studies. Our reading list includes classic game studies theory and texts which support game design methods. After weekly writing and design exercises, our coursework will culminate in the design and evaluation of an original code-based game with a tangible interface.


COMPSCI 160, 4 units

User Interface Design and Development

B. Hartmann

This course looks at the design, implementation, and evaluation of user interfaces. It focuses on user-centered design and task analytics, conceptual models and interface metaphors, usability inspection and evaluation methods. We will also perform analysis of user study data, input methods (keyboard, pointing, touch, tangible) and input models. The course will investigate visual design principles, interface prototyping and implementation methodologies and tools. Students will develop a user interface for a specific task and target user group in teams.


COMPSCI 184-001, 4 units

Foundations of Computer Graphics

R. Ng, J. O’Brien

This course is an introduction to the foundations of 3-dimensional computer graphics. Topics covered include 2D and 3D transformations, interactive 3D graphics programming with OpenGL, shading and lighting models, geometric modeling using Bézier and B-Spline curves, computer graphics rendering including ray tracing and global illumination, signal processing for anti-aliasing and texture mapping, and animation and inverse kinematics. There will be an emphasis on both the mathematical and geometric aspects of graphics, as well as the ability to write complete 3D graphics programs.


COMPSCI 188-001, 4 units

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

Staff

Basic ideas and techniques underlying the design of intelligent computer systems. Topics include heuristic search, problem solving, game playing, knowledge representation, logical inference, planning, reasoning under uncertainty, expert systems, learning, perception, language understanding.


COMPSCI 195 1, 1 unit

Social Implications of Computer Technology

Staff

Topics include electronic community; the changing nature of work; technological risks; the information economy; intellectual property; privacy; artificial intelligence and the sense of self; pornography and censorship; professional ethics. Students will lead discussions on additional topics.


DESINV 23, 3 unit

Creative Programming and Electronics

Staff

This course teaches techniques to conceptualize, design and prototype interactive objects. Students will learn core interaction design principles and learn how to program devices with and without screens, basic circuit design and construction for sensing and actuation, and debugging. Students work individually on fundamental concepts and skills, then form teams to work on an open-ended design project that requires a synthesis of the different techniques covered. This course may be used to fulfill undergraduate technical elective requirements for some College of Engineering majors; students should refer to their Engineering Student Services advisors for more details.


DESINV 25, 3 unit

User Experience Design

Staff

This studio course introduces students to design thinking and the basic practices of interaction design. Following a human-centered design process that includes research, concept generation, prototyping, and refinement, students work as individuals and in small teams to design mobile information systems and other interactive experiences. Becoming familiar with design methodologies such as sketching, storyboarding, wire framing, and prototyping, students learn core skills for understanding the rich contexts of stakeholders and their interactions with technology, for researching competing products and services, for modeling the current and preferred state of the world, and for prototyping and communicating solutions. No coding is required.


DESINV 95, 1 unit

Design Innovation Lecture Series

Staff

In this one semester, P/NP course, students will attend the weekly Design Field Notes speaker series, which features local design practitioners who share real-world stories about their projects, practices, and perspectives. Talks are scheduled most weeks during the semester; during any off weeks, students will engage in facilitated discussions.


DESINV 181, 3 units

Reimagining Mobility

Staff

In Reimagining Mobility, offered in a project-based learning format, students will envision meaningful interactions between people and different transportation modalities. Looking 10-15 years into the future, they will address elements such as car sharing, public transportation, autonomous driving, and more. The core objectives of this course are to 1) equip students with tools, techniques, and practice to master the design thinking process and 2) facilitate the creation of portfolio-grade design solutions, to be pitched to real-world customers and investors.


EDUC W140A, 4 units (also EDUC 140AC)

The Art of Making Meaning: Educational Perspectives on Literacy and Learning in a Global World

G. Hull

This course combines theory and practice in the study of literacy and development. It will introduce sociocultural educational theory and research focused especially on literacy teaching and learning, and this literature will be examined in practice through participation in after-school programs. In addition, the course will contribute to an understanding of how literacy is reflected in race, culture, and ethnicity in the United States and how these symbolic systems shift in a digital world.


FILM 20, 4 units

Film and Media Theory

E. West

This course is intended to introduce undergraduates to the study of a range of media, including photography, film, television, video, and print and digital media. The course will focus on questions of medium "specificity" or the key technological/material, formal and aesthetic features of different media and modes of address and representation that define them. Also considered is the relationship of individual media to time and space, how individual media construct their audiences or spectators, and the kinds of looking or viewing they enable or encourage. The course will discuss the ideological effects of various media, particularly around questions of racial and sexual difference, national identity, capitalism, and power.


FILM 35, 4 units

Digital Media Studies

D. McElroy

This course will focus on introductory topics related to the field of digital media studies.


GLOBAL 110K, 3 units

Africa in Global Context

Staff

This course will provide students majoring in Global Studies with an introduction to Africa and its significance to the globe. We will address issues related to Africa that span all three concentrations of the major (Society and Culture, Development, Peace and Conflict). In particular, we will focus on the following four themes:conflict, identity, development and technology.


INFO 103, 4 Units

History of Information

Staff

This course explores the history of information and associated technologies, uncovering why we think of ours as "the information age." We will select moments in the evolution of production, recording, and storage from the earliest writing systems to the world of Short Message Service (SMS) and blogs. In every instance, we'll be concerned with both what and when and how and why, and we will keep returning to the question of technological determinism: how do technological developments affect society and vice versa?


INFO 159, 4 units

Natural Language Processing

Staff

This course introduces students to natural language processing and exposes them to the variety of methods available for reasoning about text in computational systems. NLP is deeply interdisciplinary, drawing on both linguistics and computer science, and helps drive much contemporary work in text analysis (as used in computational social science, the digital humanities, and computational journalism). We will focus on major algorithms used in NLP for various applications (part-of-speech tagging, parsing, coreference resolution, machine translation) and on the linguistic phenomena those algorithms attempt to model. Students will implement algorithms and create linguistically annotated data on which those algorithms depend.


LS 25, 3 units

Thinking Through Art and Design @ Berkeley

S. Jackson and G. Niemeyer

L&S 25 introduces students to key vocabularies, forms, and histories from the many arts and design disciplines represented at UC Berkeley. It is around a central theme that responds to significant works and events on the campus, providing an introduction to the many art and design resources available to students locally.

The Spring 2023 course explores the history and future of time-based media art for students of all disciplines. Developed from the mixed media experiments of the 1960s through to new digital and virtual aesthetics of our current moment, time-based media art offers an opportunity to explore cross-pollination amongst many art forms—including cinema, photography, painting, sculpture, dance, theater, performance art, design, and even in literature. In addition to exploring these experiments in form, the course will introduce students to experiments in content, considering how media artists creatively address the pressing issues of our time, from climate change and globalization, to gender identity, racial inequality, and scientific and technological transformations. The course will be offered in Spring 2023 to take advantage of exciting developments on campus and in the Bay Area, including William Kentridge’s artist residency at Cal Performances and exhibitions at BAMPFA, ICA-San Francisco, and the Computer History Museum. It will also expose students to the staff and artworks of the Kramlich Collection, one of most influential private collections of video and media art in the world. Through a series of lectures, workshops, field trips, online tools, and creative exercises, this course will use the most significant time-based media art of the last fifty years to address how art and technology intersect with the key social, aesthetic and educational questions of our culture.



LS C30Z, 3 units

Bioinspired Design

R. Full

Bioinspired design views the process of how we learn from Nature as an innovation strategy translating principles of function, performance and aesthetics from biology to human technology. The creative design process is driven by interdisciplinary exchange among engineering, biology, art, architecture and business. Diverse teams of students will collaborate on, create, and present original bioinspired design projects. Lectures discuss biomimicry, challenges of extracting principles from Nature, scaling, robustness, and entrepreneurship through case studies highlighting robots that run, fly, and swim, materials like gecko-inspired adhesives, artificial muscles, medical prosthetic devices, and translation to start-ups.


MEDIAST 132, 4 units

Researching Digital Media: Methods & Methodologies

E. Fraser

The question of how to study digital content, or use digital methodologies, is extremely complex. Should we simply adapt existing methods for media, culture and social analysis and apply these to digital and networked technologies? Are web-native or digital-native processes the only appropriate methodologies available for the study of the digital? What theoretical frameworks or technical skills are best positioned to capture ever-evolving online communications, communities and practices? What are the pitfalls of digital research, and can they be avoided? How do you use digitally-focused methods in context? Finally, how has academic research and practice changed in response to digitally mediated cultures and societies? These key questions wi


MEDIAST 165, 4 units

Internet and Culture

J. Jackson

This class uses the approaches of media studies and cultural studies to critically consider how historical and emerging new media technologies as well as the behaviors and forms of cultural production associated with them influence and are themselves influenced by our everyday practices and lived experiences. It focuses particularly on concerns of identity, community, access, citizenship, industry, and regulation as these relate to social networking, collective endeavor, and public speech.


MELC 110, 4 units

Digital Humanities and Egyptology

R. Lucarelli

The material and written culture of ancient Egypt constitutes one of the best preserved and most robust archaeological corpora to survive from antiquity as well as one of the most popular avenues for public engagement within the Humanities. Digital initiatives have become crucial for the conservation, documentation, and dissemination of ancient Egyptian material and texts to the broadest possible audience. This course will introduce students to the main projects of Egyptology in the field of archaeology, philology, and material studies, which apply techniques of Digital Humanities, from 3D modeling of objects and architectural spaces to digital epigraphy and the creation of searchable databases.


MUSIC 29, 4 units

Music Now

E. Campion

This course explores the basic materials and models that set the boundaries for various present-day musical experiences. Students are exposed to terminology and modes of engagement with the aim of inspiring new paradigms of listening (e.g., listening to silence, noise, space, and timbre). Composers and musicians of today continue to explore new ways of defining and organizing sounds into music. The course focuses on the most adventurous music of our time, but the concepts learned can be applied to any style of music. The course is designed to enrich and deepen the students' musical abilities through direct involvement with musical materials. Direct engagement through listening and participatory learning is accomplished in part with software created at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies. The course does not require students to be able to read music nor to own a personal computer.


MUSIC 158A, 4 units

Sound and Music Computing with CNMAT Technologies

Staff

Explores the intersection of music and computers using a combination of scientific, technological, and artistic methodologies. Musical concerns within a computational frame are addressed through the acquisition of basic programming skills for the creation and control of digital sound. Will learn core concepts and techniques of computer based music composition using the Cycling74/MaxMSP programming environment in combination with associated software tools and programming approaches created by the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies. Included will be exposure to the essentials of digital audio signal processing, musical acoustics and psychoacoustics, sound analysis and synthesis. The course is hands-on and taught from the computer lab.


MUSIC 158B, 4 units

Situated Instrument Design for Musical Expression

A. Blanton

The practice and theory of contextual instrument design for use in musical expression is explored. Students create new instruments and performance environments using a variety of physical interaction paradigms, programming practices, and musical processes emerging from the UC Berkeley Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT). Building on the methodologies established in Music 158A, the course develops aesthetic, analytic and technical skills through discussion, empirical study, and collaborative engagement. With a balance of artistic and technical concerns, participants deepen understanding of the creative process, demonstrating the results through class installation and public performance.


SOCIOL 166, 4 units

Society and Technology

Staff

This course studies the interaction between society and technologies in a comparative and multicultural perspective. Some topics covered include the relationship between technology and human society; technology, culture and values; technology in the new global economy; development and inequality; electronic democracy; how technology has transformed work and employment; and the challenges of technological progress and the role that society plays in addressing these challenges.


SOCIOL 167, 4 units

Virtual Communities/ Social Media

E. Lin

With the advent of virtual communities and online social networks, old questions about the meaning of human social behavior have taken on renewed significance. Using a variety of online social media simultaneously, and drawing upon theoretical literature in a variety of disciplines, this course delves into discourse about community across disciplines. This course will enable students to establish both theoretical and experiential foundations for making decisions and judgments regarding the relations between mediated communication and human community.

FOR MORE INFORMATION or to suggest changes or additions, please contact BCNM Program Officer Lara Wolfe (lara@berkeley.edu).