The loud chatter of enthusiastic voices of student presenters and visitors at the fourth annual BOOM '01 fair of student creativity in digital technology and applications in Upson Hall on Feb. 28 spoke volumes about the level of research that students participate in at Cornell. At BOOM Feb. 28, senior Ben Wong, a physics and computer science major, left, explains a system that recognizes human facial expressions. More than 115 students participated in the fair. But not everyone who is tall is big as well, and not everyone who is small is thin. Also on view at BOOM was a project involving the burgeoning world of education via the Internet.
Fugues have a repeated melody, called the subject, that occurs throughout the piece.
The program, as one example, rates the subject by using notes that don't jump around too much in pitch, encouraging the subject to stay with similar notes and be in the right key, weeding out notes that are too high or too low and keeping subjects with similar note lengths together. The result is pleasant-sounding music. If the program runs through too few generations, the notes sound too random. On the other hand, the notes sound too regular if the program runs for too many generations. Although the resulting fugue could not compare with the masterpieces of Johann Sebastian Bach, noted Chestnutt, a 5,000th-generation fugue sounds ne, especially coming from a computer.