Joe Brown’s hair matches his eyes. They’re both intensely blue. In fact, intense is a good way to describe him. Also passionate. And smart—but not in the traditional sense. Brown is definitely untraditional—and I’m not talking about his hair.
I contacted Joe Brown ’14 after an instructor in the physics department sent me an e-mail that read “You’ve got to meet this kid.” Indeed, in the Carleton sea of exceptional kids, Brown does stand out.
He has combined his love of music and computer science (his major) to develop—with classmate Calder Coalson ’14—a computer program that turns a human voice into a dub step instrument. “The process of studying piano or trumpet for a number of years is prohibitive because you end up with one skill set,” says Brown, who is from New Jersey. His and Coalson’s program translates the parameters of the voice—pitch and timbre—into the parameters of an instrument of your choosing. In theory, using their program, a musician could record a song that features multiple instruments using only his or her voice.
When Brown and I meet in the spring, the dub step program is his primary focus—and the final project for an independent study course he’s taking with music instructor John Ellinger. But it’s far from his only project. There’s the box fan (a project for an electronics class) that he outfitted with LED lights. Working in conjunction with the dub step program, the fan’s lights change color based on the data it receives from Brown’s laptop via WiFi. He also outfitted his skateboard with LED lights that change color as he rides faster, eventually shooting a rainbow of light when he reaches maximum speed. That one was just for fun.
I asked Brown to tell me what he’s learned in the past four years.
—Teresa Scalzo
Here’s how I approach my projects:
- There’s a thing I want.
- I don’t have the tools.
- I do the research and find that the tools I want don’t exist or are prohibitively expensive or they’re not good enough.
- I make my own tools, with varying levels of success.
I have an intense drive to get something real accomplished. It’s counteracademic because I’m not willing to put in the time to learn correctly. I’m always worried when I pick up a book or go into a class that I’m going to learn a bunch of things I don’t need.
At the end of my college career, it seems like I’ve been quite silly the entire time.
I’m not planning to stay in Minnesota. I’ve had mediocre experiences with the weather. It feels to me like it’s night all the time.
I think I would benefit from grad school but as it stands, my GPA is horrible. It feels like it’s too late.
When do you stop studying for your life and start living it?
I’m monomaniacal. I get focused and I want to maximize my performance in one thing. It’s a greedy algorithm. You’re just looking at what’s right in front of you and trying to move straight ahead, instead of using a more advanced algorithm like divide and conquer.
The fact that I think I can beat the shit out of a math problem and win is ridiculous.
I do a bad job of organizing my life. It’s partly an artifact of me and it’s partly my middle-class upbringing where my parents made a lot of decisions for me.
I want to be part of the evolutionary computing scene and develop artificial intelligence.
You give a computer a problem and it learns how to solve the problem. You can trust it to solve the problem, but you don’t necessarily know how it does that. Whereas if I write a program, I tell the computer to use these things I’ve given it, so I know how it arrives at the solution.
Fundamentally, I believe that humans are a type of computer.
I believe that we exist inside a physical universe and we have a brain and our soul is somehow linked to that, perhaps very directly. At the end of the day, our brain is a complicated computing mechanism, and so I believe that computers have the ability to emulate the human mind.
I’m not sure if a computer would end up having a soul or not. That’s not important to me.
If the robot overlords decide to kill us one day, it will be because it is the right thing to do, not because they are angry.
I have a touch for the dramatic.