Dave Mash with Don Peebles at Macworld and Berklee Music Festival

This past July, David Mash connected MacWorld Conference and Expo Boston more intimately with Berklee College of Music through BOSFCPUG, which provided a striking demo of music to video in seconds flat. (See "From Concert to Cut in Minutes Flat").

The event drew a nice big crowd of MacWorld attendees and music devotees, and it’s typical of David Mash’s influence in joining resources to demonstrate interesting and useful ends.

Dave Mash, Vice President, Information Technology, Berklee College

David S. Mash started playing guitar at age 7. At 11 he studied under esteemed classical guitarist Andre Segovia. Growing up as a teen in Detroit, he worked at Motown. He attended University of Michigan as a pre-med student, and taught guitar privately. He switched to music and attended Berklee in 1973 as a composition major, started teaching guitar while still a student. Ironically, the former pre-med student had “a run in with a doctor” and temporarily lost the use of his left hand, turned to keyboard and then music technology. Today in his fulltime job he administers information technology throughout the ever-expanding Berklee campus—4000 students making music every day-- but he takes occasional breaks to play with friends, often as part of his teaching engagements in venues like MacWorld Conference and Expo Boston.

This interview with David was conducted last July.

BOSFCPUG: How did Berklee’s connection with Apple Computer develop?

DM: We were using computers in the curriculum back in late 1982, with the Apple II, so when the Macintosh came out, we were probably one of the first music schools to jump on the bandwagon and see its value. One of my students was involved with writing the first sequencer program for the Macintosh– his name was Roy Groth and he worked at Mark of the Unicorn [www.motu.com] developing a program called Performer, which is now called Digital Performer.

So we were very early adopters of the Mac; I think I built our first lab that had multiple Macintoshes in 1985, early ’86—that was the Music Synthesis Lab, and we started with 18 Mac Plus machines. And in 1987 Apple did a video called Macintosh, MIDI and Music: The Open Door. It was about a half hour long, featured Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Laurie Anderson—a bunch of people using the Mac for music, and they featured Berklee College and me in that video as well.

I started doing events at MacWorld in 1987, and again, in a really big way in the late 90’s. Apple had a program called AppleMasters, and they invited me to be one of the original AppleMasters, which was great. I’ll never forget, the first time I went out to Cupertino for the program inaugural, they had us assemble in the hotel lobby, and we rode to the Apple campus– in a limo with Muhammed Ali, Michael Crichton, Richard Dreyfuss, Jennifer Jason-Leigh, Gregory Hines—and me!
After a whole day at Apple I called my wife: “You’ll never guess who I spent the day with!” She couldn’t, so I read her the names, and she asked “So why are you there?” [Laugh] That’s how I felt, too.

BOSFCPUG: It leads to the question, regarding the newest policy for incoming students, that they be armed with an Apple PowerBook. Isn’t choice important?



DM: It becomes kind of like a textbook decision. If you’ve got somebody teaching say math, you’d want everyone in the class using the same math textbook, so that you know you can say to the class, for next time I want you to read pages 26 through 82 and you’ll know that everyone is on the same page. Same thing here. We need to make sure that, when a teacher makes an assignment, that all the students will have the same platform, the same operating system, the same software and version. And some actions involve specific operating system extras like QuickTime which are very robust for music but not completely cross-platform. From an educational perspective we have to mandate the platform. And we expected there would be some push-back.

BOSFCPUG: Have you gotten any resistance?

DM: No; in fact most parents I talk to thank us for telling them what to get. Many would make the decision based on other factors. And they’d end up spending the same amount of money, and maybe more, and get the wrong machine.

BOSFCPUG: Are you literally specifying the PowerBook? What about the less expensive iBook?

DM: We chose the PowerBook because music work places a fairly significant hit on the CPU. Especially if you’re going to use it for sound generation, which we do. We felt it was important to give them the higher level of power. What we did to help make it as palatable as we could was, we went to bat with buying power.

We’re in the process of ordering another 1300 units for this year; we distributed 2200 units last year. This year we’re offering the 1.33 GHz G4 PowerBook, 15” screen, 512 MB RAM, 60 GB hard drive, DVD SuperDrive, and Airport Extreme for wireless networking. Not exactly a stripped down model.

BOSFCPUG: The whole school is a wireless hotspot?

DM: [Laugh] I used to watch the truckers drive up along the building and check their email. Now it’s a closed network, you have to log in with a student name and password. But all of our campus is covered. So a student can open their laptop, log into the server and do their ear training work right there in the practice room.

When I came to Berklee in 1973, I thought it would be great to have a keyboard, to practice harmony and ear training stuff, and I went out and bought a used Wurlitzer  electric piano for about $800. It died after about a year and it was so heavy to move from my apartment. So the idea of having something that’s really light and portable that connects to the computer. and sounds like a full piano or anything you want, it makes a great learning-assist tool. As part of the laptop package we include an M-Audio Oxygen-8 MIDI controller. So students have a complete music production tool.

A month into the program, I got a request to meet with the student governance organization. They wanted us to add furniture into the practice rooms—to put their laptops. The music stands weren’t stable enough.

BOSFCPUG: They were using sheet music stands for their PowerBooks?

DM: Yep. And actually, I was interested to see students in practice rooms with their laptops open, with the sheet music on the screen as a PDF file—rather than carrying around a big heavy fake book.

BOSFCPUG: So you almost let the population tell you what the needs are?

DM: I have two daughters. One thing I learned quite a long time ago, even if you’re the most technologically-savvy and interested person like I am – geek that I am -- there’s still a big part of your life that you lived, without this kind of technology. This was never new to my kids; they always had a computer, in their memory. And so they do things differently with it. I want to watch for that and support it as best I can.

One of the first surprises was iTunes. Now, you and I use iTunes to store music, play it,  and organize it and transfer it to an iPod and things like that, Well, the students instantly found out that, because of the seamless wireless network across the whole campus,  that they could turn on iTunes sharing… and put the music they’re composing into their own iTunes library, and what they created was an anarchistic radio station! Where anyone can select and listen to anyone else’s music. It’s completely transparent—whoever has their computer open and is sharing their creations is accessible. Now, I wouldn’t have thought to look for that. So it’s interesting, one of the first things that came up right away was: student internet radio station.

BOSFCPUG: And that’s happening?

DM: Yep, there’s a group together, there’s a course to be offered in the fall that will give credit for participating. We put a Shoutcast server in place, and in a few weeks we’ll be posting the server link.

BOSFCPUG: How do you think Berklee rates in terms of technology among other music schools?

DM: I think we have more technology per square foot than any other music school in the world, and it’s more integrated into the curriculum, and more into the life of the college than any other place. I would challenge anyone to disprove that, and if successful I would go and learn from those people!

We  prepare students for careers in contemporary music, everything you do in the business these days is touched by technology. Learning, conception, composition, recording, distribution. A lot of schools are doing good things, don’t get me wrong, but at the scale that we’re doing it, we’re unique.

BOSFCPUG: There must be a few luddites. Are you in charge of assuaging the grumblers? 



DM: I am the Vice President for Change. [Laugh] Sometimes that’s good, sometimes not. Change is difficult. It’s really easy to buy stuff if you have money; it’s really hard to change the way people think; that’s the challenge, getting them to think differently.

BOSFCPUG: What do you do in your spare time?

DM: The job is here is fairly time-consuming. At home I have a recording studio. I compose and burn CD’s for friends. I use Digital Performer, and now Logic.

I usually conduct a Power Tools or User Conference on something related to music technology, as I did here at MacWorld Boston.  I think Boston’s become a world-class city and it makes sense to hold it here.

BOSFCPUG: Can you speak to Berklee’s distance learning initiative?

DM: We have an online school, opened last January, and we’ve had about 1600 students enrolled in courses. We offer about 60 undergrad courses, kind of like an extension school model. These are courses in music production and the music business. All done over the internet, yet instructor-led.

There’s a weekly chat with the instructor in real-time, and ongoing discussion boards between students and teachers. We have a lot of immersive media in the coursework; a lot of movies and animation that instructs. We’re starting to offer extension school credit, we’re going to be offering diploma courses in the fall. We’re not doing it yet but we’re exploring graduate programs. 

BOSFCPUG: Berklee is also linked to affiliate and partnership programs with schools all over the world, using ISDN lines, teleconferencing equipment featuring remote camera control. Where is that going?

DM: We’re just completing right now our physical connections to Internet 2, which started as a research project to be the successor to the internet. It’s geared toward high speed  interaction. Right now it’s pretty much just in the university environment, but it’s a 20Gbit/second backbone, very fast considering the average broadband rate consumers currently use is around 1 Mbit/second. So we’re going to do our first experiments in September. We actually hope to have some singers in Los Angeles singing with the band here, in front of an audience. In theory, no delay, no latency. Response has to be under ten milliseconds in order for it to feel right, and we think we can do that. Our goal then is to conduct real master classes, where students can play with distant instructors and vice versa. That gives distance learning a whole new feel.

BOSFCPUG: Our next stop here at Berklee is Don Wilkins at Film Scoring. Any thoughts on the evolution of that department?

DM: Don will show you a lot of interesting things. We have specialized facilities that are really geared toward the immediate needs of the specific discipline. So Film Scoring’s facilities look very different from, say Music Synthesis. We asked ‘How do we support that department?’ For instance, Film Scoring was the first department on campus to get a storage area network. It makes sense for them to have their video stored on a central server so their students can write to that storage space.

Read the interview with Don Wilkins also here at BOSFCPUG’s website.

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When he isn’t switching angles from Camera 1 to 2 to 3, Loren S. Miller edits “film style” for clients ranging from useful NGO’s to broadcast series to independent feature producers. Loren offers KeyGuides to intermediate and advanced keyboard users worldwide, with select editions available here at BOSFCPUG at discount. Reach Loren anytime at .