Facilities | Department of Music

Staller Center for the Arts, named in memory of Max and Mary Staller, offers a wide variety of world class performances from September through May and presents the Stony Brook Film Festival every July. Over 50 professional performances, as well as approximately 450 events generated by the departments of Art, Theater Arts, and Music, are part of the Staller Center season and are supplemented by those outside presenters such as the Long Island Philharmonic and the Seiskaya Ballet, which presents The Nutcracker.

Since opening in 1978, Staller Center for the Arts has presented an ever-expanding schedule of live music, dance, theatre, and fine art exhibitions in its five theaters and 5,000 square foot University Art Gallery. In 1994, the center introduced 35mm film presentations in the Main Stage Theater, complete with Long Island’s largest screen and a Dolby sound system. The Fall and Spring Semester Film Series brings campus and community the best in art, foreign and popular films. The Main Stage theater seats approximately 1,050, the Recital Hall seats 380, and the three "black box" theaters have a seating capacity from 75 to 225.

Many individuals and corporations provide generous financial contributions that enable the center to present world renowned entertainers at reasonable prices.

The Fine Arts Building, also called the Music Buiding or Music Wing of the Staller Center for the Arts, is a 5-story building, 4 of which house the Department of Music. There are mixed-used rehearsal spaces, student practice studios, classrooms, peformance studios and administrative offices.

The Stony Brook Electronic and Computer Music Studios are the nexus of our electroacoustic music community. Continuing the long tradition of electroacoustic music at Stony Brook, we offer state-of-the-art facilities that combine the latest in digital technology with an array of analog equipment, including Buchla, Moog, and ARP synthesizers. Classes held in the studios attract a broad spectrum of students with wide-ranging interests, and emphasize the creation and discussion of new works. On any given evening one might find a an undergraduate computer science major meticulously editing a reel-to-reel tape for his class in analog synthesis, while down the hall a doctoral student in composition is improvising at the computer, playing together with her cellist colleague, using Max/MSP interactive software.

We are advocates for electroacoustic music, and offer regular concerts in which new pieces from Stony Brook students are heard alongside works by established composers. We actively seek opportunities for collaborations with other disciplines, and are frequently seen working in conjunction with visual artists, dancers, poets, filmmakers, and creative people of all stripes. We are teachers and practitioners, and members of our community are active participants in the greater electroacoustic music community.

Studio A is our analog studio. It contains a wide range of vintage equipment, including oscillators, ring modulators, filters, envelope generators, and a Buchla 200 synthesizer. Users of the studio can edit works on one of four reel-to-reel tape decks or on a computer workstation using Pro Tools.
Studio B is a high-end, single-user studio with a focus on multichannel audio. It will easily transition from 8-channel ambisonic to standard 5.1 surround sound. The core of the studio will be two Power Mac G5 computers, set up as a linked pair so that one computer can dedicate its full power to audio processing while the other is being used for recording.
Studio C is our multi-user studio and classroom. Three computer workstations are available, each built around a Power Mac G5 computer running a full suite of audio applications, including Max/MSP, Pro Tools, Logic Audio, and Reason. In addition, each workstation features an arsenal of digital audio hardware, including a Digi002 audio interface and an array of various external synthesizers, effects units, and controllers. For classroom instruction, Studio C has a video projection system to which all computers are connected, allowing for easy demonstration of lesson material, as well as a top-shelf monitoring system with speakers custom-made by our emertius engineer Andy Nittoli.

History
In the 1960s, electronic music pioneer Bülent Arel was director of electronic music at Yale University. In 1971 he founded Stony Brook University's Electronic Music Studio and taught a course in fundamentals of electronic music. In 1973-4, both Arel and Daria Semegen designed a second analog studio and several editing studios. While teaching and working at Columbia-Princeton's electronic music center, Semegen developed Stony Brook's additional electronic music courses and assembled an electronic music library. Stony Brook University was one of the first U.S. universities to offer a comprehensive graduate curriculum in Electronic Music Studies including technical studies, electronic music composition, and history of electronic music and technology with a collection of audio/visual materials and printed literature.

Additional facilities
In addition to the facilities at Stony Brook Studios, our students also have access to the 22 workstations available at the Staller Center SINC site, each of which features a full suite of professional applications, including Logic, Reason, Sibelius, and Final Cut Pro.

Our new Hybrid site has an additional 18 computers available, running Logic, Max/MSP, and Final Cut Pro, along with other applications.

Collaborative:

emedia SINC Site (Instructional Computing public computer site and primary multi-media classroom with imaging, audio, video, and 2D and 3D animation)

Art:

Video Editing Suites (for DV video and digital audio production to DVD and web)
Shooting Studio (for still and video shoots) with green screen cyclorama (for digital keying)
Installation Art Lab for Physical Computing (projection, interactivity, performance, sculpture and sensors)
Equipment Checkout System (for digital still cameras, DV video cameras, microphones, mini-disk and DAT recorders for production and DVD players, speakers, and projectors for exhibition and performance)