Campion joined CNMAT as the composer-in-residence in 1996 and became director in 2014. He will retire in spring 2027, and Cella will assume full responsibilities of the center. Cella is preparing to expand the center’s community engagement with a new artist residency and annual festival with tech demonstrations, panel discussions, and breathtaking performances.
“The festival would be both a hub for music and artistic creation and a way to communicate the research that has been done,” said Cella.
CNMAT researchers believe the festival will ensure that the tools, instruments, and devices they develop will have a good shot at spreading throughout the industry.
“CNMAT’s laboratory is the stage,” said Campion. “We don’t just propose and experiment — we create and demonstrate that the results are musical!”
Edmund Campion (left) and Carmine-Emanuele Cella (right)
A noteworthy history
CNMAT occupies a storied building a block north of campus that used to house 1750 Arch Records, an influential studio that recorded more than 200 albums in jazz, bluegrass, classical, and experimental music. In the 1980s, Berkeley music professor Richard Felciano, with support from department chair Bonnie Wade, worked to establish an electronic music research center inspired by the success of Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics and the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique-Musique in Paris. The university purchased the property, and CNMAT was born.
Inaugural director David Wessel and research director Adrian Freed presided over nearly three decades of trailblazing research and cutting-edge software and hardware development. One of CNMAT’s tools, Open Sound Control, has become a standard for live music venues with synchronized sound and lighting.
“If you’ve been to a major concert event this year that had any type of lighting, there’s a good chance that Open Sound Control helped to coordinate the show’s controls,” said Jeremy Wagner, CNMAT’s technical coordinator and staff research composer.
“Open Sound Control is ubiquitous. It has had a much larger impact than we would ever have dreamed, and it’s still freely available.” — Jeremy Wagner
CNMAT shares UC Berkeley’s dedication to the common good. Rather than monetizing and restricting access to its technology, the center releases its tools and research to the public free of charge. Audio enthusiasts and even large companies like Dolby and venue management giant ASM Global can build on CNMAT’s tools.
“We’re a group that shares everything we do openly,” said Campion. “Music is a fantastic testing case for all forms of new technology. Music has a wonderful way of pushing new tools and ideas to the limit as it requires precise timing and rich, complex data.”
CNMAT's headquarters are located at 1750 Arch Street (left). Jeremy Wagner (right) stands near the building's entrance. Photos by Jen Siska.
Building resonant spaces
CNMAT is well-positioned to capitalize on the surging student interest in audio technology. Computer science and EECS (electrical engineering and computer science) are two of the three most popular majors at UC Berkeley, while music is the fastest-growing major since the pandemic. Between 2020 and 2024, music majors grew by an astonishing 238 percent. The Department of Music recently updated its curriculum to reflect modern interests and increased the use of digital audio workstations to teach electronic music production.
Still, the iconic CNMAT building at 1750 Arch Street is in need of improvement and preservation. Better lighting and fixtures, an upgraded HVAC system, and more communal spaces would help visitors feel more welcome. A downstairs production studio would provide students with an additional space to record audio beyond the main room, which is often booked for classes, workshops, meetings, and concerts. Students have also expressed a desire for more equipment to handle the busy end-of-semester season when they present their work.
Cella has a dream to convert the unused tennis court on the CNMAT property into an ambisonic theater space to bolster three-dimensional sound research. Stanford, after all, has such a space; why shouldn’t Berkeley? CNMAT researchers are developing innovative spatial sound platforms where listeners hear different noises or tones depending on where they are in a room. Wagner, CNMAT’s technical coordinator, helped design the advanced sound system for Wu Performance Hall, which will serve as a principal performance venue for CNMAT.
A CNMAT performer holds two audio devices. Photo by Jen Siska.
Striking a new chord
Cella will need to chart a path for CNMAT at a time of rapid technological change and profound uncertainty. He anticipates three focal areas for CNMAT research in the near future: control systems, where innovative sensors and controllers generate audio; generative systems that use code to construct sounds; and explicable AI, which seeks to understand how AI models function. Each research area has the potential to transform the music and tech industries.
“Rather than replacing artists, we envision a co-evolution of humans and machines, with AI as a thoughtful partner in the musical workflow,” said Cella. “CNMAT is a hybrid space that pushes research and creation forward — that’s our identity — but we pair that innovation with critical vigilance around ethics, privacy, authorship, and accountability. In the early 2000s, places like CNMAT built software and hardware no one else could; today we bring that same spirit to AI, responsibly and with a human-centered lens.”
Of course, even though CNMAT researchers have experimented with AI for years, there is a wide range of views on the recent wave of AI-generated music.
“We must center the human in all of this work,” said Wagner. “Our use of AI has more to do with tools that help humans make music, not try to supplant them or offset their artistic labor.”
Wagner pointed to Orchidea, a software tool developed by Cella that leverages machine learning to help composers convert a desired sound into an orchestral score. If a composer wants to mimic the sound of dripping water, the tool will identify the instruments, chords, and notes that combine to create the strongest resemblance. Conductors can then lead an orchestra of real musicians with the resulting score.
“Many companies have very simple musical models, like a person singing with a guitar, whereas we do extended techniques, multiple instruments, and symphonic orchestras,” said Cella. “The compositional models behind these are way larger. It’s not chords, melodies, or rhythms — it’s sounds, texture, and density. Their technology is good but not well-tailored to music. The expertise we can offer is that we can bend this technology so it is actually useful for a specific type of music creation.”
Though the future may be uncertain, it’s an exciting time for CNMAT. The ideas that CNMAT’s forward-thinking researchers have been exploring for decades have captured the zeitgeist. The possibilities for music technologists seem endless.
“CNMAT is many different things,” said Campion. “At the heart are powerful ideas that emerge from collaboration across disciplines, grounded in music and focused on the human. It’s not just audio anymore. It’s all forms of technology that can interact with or augment new music. There’s no other place like it in the world.”
