Corey Cheng
coreyc@miami.edu
http://eamusic.dartmouth.edu/~corey
“Music technology is also the science of hearing, why things sound the way they do to human beings. There are so many scientists, ancient and modern, who are also excellent musicians—it’s not hard to see how these two worlds have affected each other some way.“
- Corey Cheng
What would you say are the outstanding highlights of your professional life?
1. One of the most memorable was recording the sounds of the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT). We had been hired to measure the sound levels in a trading pit at CBOT—to see if the sound levels in a particular trading pit were correlated with the price or volume of certain types of trades.
2. Working in the research department at Dolby Laboratories was also an incredible experience. I learned a lot just by listening to how others had worked on similar problems in sound engineering.
3. Traveling to China to lead a group of my colleagues in a discussion on spatial and multichannel audio at the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Exposition.
Why do you teach?
Two of my close friends said I’d wind up as an acoustical engineer teaching somewhere, lost in my own world. I laughed back then, because I thought it was such an eclectic combination of things to do with my life. But the field has just exploded in the last few decades, and look at where I am now…
How were you influenced by your teachers?
My fifth grade teacher Jack Sughrue let me skip some reading assignments so I could program a Texas Instruments home computer to play Bach concertos. John Stewart was my first-year music theory teacher at Harvard, and he taught me that there is a certain amount of innocence that is lost when you study an art for the first time. I have been deeply and intensely affected by the thoughts and lives of my professors in music at Dartmouth, my teachers and advisors at Michigan.
Most recently, Corey Cheng worked as a staff engineer in the sound technology division of the research department at Dolby Laboratories, San Francisco, where he developed improvements to the AC-3 (Dolby Digital) and AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) perceptual audio codecs. Corey also consulted regularly with Dolby’s intellectual property groups on patent strategy and patent claim analysis, and he has several U.S. and international patents and patents pending for his work.
While at Dolby, Corey
- co-designed an audio codec for the Radio@AOL service at America-Online
- researched multiple-description techniques for quality of service (QoS) improvements to audio streamed over 802.11 wireless (Wi-Fi) networks
- developed novel power estimation techniques in the MDCT domain
- investigated novel audio-visual synchronization techniques
Prior to Dolby, Corey worked on
- car audio equalization research at Fujitsu-Ten Corporation
- econosonometric analysis with the Finance Department at the University of Michigan School of Business Administration and the Chicago Board of Trade
- head-related transfer function (HRTF) measurement at the Naval Submarine Medical Research Laboratory (NSMRL), Groton, Connecticut
He has also worked with wavelet applications of signal processing for audio applications. Corey’s technical work and electro-acoustic music compositions have appeared in various international conferences and journals, including
- IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing
- Journal of the Audio Engineering Society
- Computer Music Journal
- New England Journal of Mathematics
Among the many conferences and symposia where Prof. Cheng has presented are
- 2007 ACM International MultiMedia Modeling Conference
- 2006 Audio Engineering Society 120th Convention, Paris
- 2006 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo
- Audio Engineering Society
- Sound In Space Symposium
- International Conference on Auditory Display
- Audio Engineering Society
- International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing
- 16th International conference on spatial sound reproduction, Finland
- Proceedings of the 1997 International Computer Music Conference
Prof. Cheng is director of the Music Engineering Technology programs and has a second appointment in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Corey holds degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan (Ph.D. 2001, M.S.E. 1998), electro-acoustic music from Dartmouth College (M.A. 2006), and physics from Harvard University (B.A. 1994).
Corey’s musical background includes training in violin, viola, conducting, and composition. He has studied composition with Ivan Tcherepnin, Charles Dodge, Larry Polansky, John Appleton, and Evan Chambers. Corey has played in numerous symphony and show orchestras and he was a co-conductor in the Harvard-Radcliffe Toscanini Chamber Orchestra.
Listen to audio clips of Dr. Cheng’s compositions.
- Woods, a composition for computer alert sounds. International Computer Music Conference CD, Thessaloniki, Grece: 1997.
- Fishbowl, a binaural composition for tape and headphones. Presented at Society of Electro-acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS), 2000, and also released on Computer Music Journal CD, MIT Press: 2001.
Dr. Cheng ran a panel session for the first inaugural University of Miami School of Business “Global Business Forum” in January 2009. Listen to the complete forum.
Listen to Dr. Cheng’s talk at the Miami Museum of Science.
These are three cover pages from Dr. Cheng’s many publications, presentations and patents.