CCT Interim Director Stephen David Beck

Stephen David Beck's CV 

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In September 2008, LSU Provost Astrid Merget and Vice Chancellor for Research & Economic Development Brooks Keel appointed Stephen David Beck to serve as Interim Director of the CCT. Beck leads the CCT along with co-director Jorge Pullin as the University conducts an international search to select a new CCT director.

Beck is Professor of Composition and Computer Music at the LSU School of Music. He joined the faculty at CCT in 2003, where he is director of the CCT Laboratory for Creative Arts & Technologies, which looks at applying high-performance computing applications to emerging areas of the arts and humanities, such as music, animation, digital art and video game development. As part of the lab's outreach efforts, Beck and Stacey Simmons created the Red Stick International Animation Festival, an annual event that highlights the links among art, computational science and technology in 2005. He also is focus area lead for the Cultural Computing Focus Area, which explores research in this area, and he hosts the CCT’s Computing the Arts & Humanities lecture series to bring distinguished researchers from this field to campus.

Beck served as principal investigator for AVATAR : Arts, Visualization, Advanced Technologies and Research, a campuswide multidisciplinary hiring initiative that will bring new faculty to LSU who will create curricula in digital media. AVATAR, which the University implemented in the Spring 2008 semester, was an integral part of EA Sports’ recent decision to locate its North American quality control and testing facility at LSU’s South Campus.

Beck’s specialty is electro-acoustic composition, and his current research includes sound diffusion systems, high-performance computing applications for music, and virtual music instruments, which are systems of interactive computer programs that extend and expand the performance capabilities of acoustic instruments.

He received his Ph.D. in music composition and theory from the University of California- Los Angeles in 1988, and held a Fulbright Fellowship in 1985-86 where he was a researcher at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris, France.