www.union.edu
Palma Catravas
Title: Assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering
Undergraduate and graduate colleges: University of Maryland, B.S. and B.M., 1991; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, S.M., 1994, and Ph.D., 1998; post- graduate work at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 1998-2002
Major: Electrical engineering and piano performance, undergraduate; electrical engineering, graduate school
Minerva: Beuth House
Hometown: Silver Spring, MD
Palma Catravas’ office on the second floor of Steinmetz Hall bulges with papers and books – titles with “optics,” “circuits” and “electromagnetics” are prominent – and the marker board on the wall is filled with colorful zig-zag diagrams that are, she explains, regions of convergence for z-transforms – part of digital signal processing and the product of hours of meetings with students taking the class on “Discrete Systems.”
Her desk, meanwhile, overflows with fliers and programs announcing chamber music concerts, recitals, lectures and other musical events.
Forging new links between music and engineering is a natural for Catravas, who performed solo with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra when she was 12 and completed a double degree in electrical engineering and piano performance as an undergraduate.
She continued to perform while an electrical engineering graduate student at MIT and later helped launch a noontime concert series in memory of scientist M. Nitschke at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.
These days, Catravas finds herself collaborating with many of her former music and engineering colleagues – a personal and career convergence that she finds exhilarating.
In 2004, MIT Professor Emeritus Stephen Senturia presented a “Double Feature” – that is, a colloquium on his area of electrical engineering research and a full-length chamber music recital with Senturia on the clarinet and Catravas on the piano. Prof. Joel Dawson of MIT presented this year’s Double Feature, speaking on wireless communications and joining Senturia and Catravas on viola.
Last spring, Catravas’ “Sound and Engineering” class joined with Associate Professor of Music Tim Olsen’s “Music in the 20th Century” class in a special event entitled, “Many Out of One: The Voices of the Piano,” with guest Bradford Gowen, professor of piano at the University of Maryland.
“Bradford Gowen is an inspiring scholar and gripping performer,” Catravas noted. “He gave two lecture recitals on how the modern piano influenced compositional styles, followed by an evening recital. The engineering students had been studying acoustics theory related to the keyboard instruments and could then hear how the engineering of the modern piano enabled experimentation with new sounds.”
Media Services Director Virginia Solomon, she noted, gave the students hands-on training in recording equipment and guided them in recording the event.
(In another felicitous connection, it turns out that Gowen and his wife, Maribeth, a piano duo, have performed “Water’s Edge” by composer and Union Professor of Music Hilary Tann.)
In the meantime, students have been working on their own collaborative engineering and music projects. Dan Starr ’05, a double major in electrical engineering and computer science, finished his award-winning senior capstone project last year, an “Acoustic Instrument Sampler” co-supervised by Catravas and Assistant Professor of Computer Science Brian Postow.
“Dan designed a program capable of taking in a few sample notes from various instruments and generating jazz music, including special effects such as legato, staccato and slurs,” Catravas said.
Eric Mapplethorpe ’06, J.P. Farley ’06 and Stephen Lee’06, a trumpet player, will be doing their senior projects in engineering acoustics in the coming year.
“Music is something that students really enjoy, and the rich links between acoustics and electrical engineering provide a wonderful teaching opportunity,” Catravas says. “There are many students who choose to study one of the hard sciences who are also serious musicians.
“We are looking forward to collaborating with the music department to develop a panorama of activities for them at this interface, both in the laboratory and the classroom. There’s definitely more to come.”