“Joan” is a graduate student composer in the UC Berkeley music department, interested in learning more about computer music, so a faculty member points her to the website and recommends she look around and see what interests her. She starts by looking up some pieces she likes; for each one she sees links to some of the specific techniques used in the piece, for example, "additive synthesis", "score following", "sample playback," "granulation," "convolution," "alternate controllers," "spatial sound," etc. Almost every piece will have two or more such tags. By clicking on a tag she is brought to an automatically-generated list of all the pieces that use that technique (as well as other nodes on the site related to that technique, such as tutorials, external links, etc.) In this way her aesthetic interests guide her towards relevant technical topics.
She finds the page on “onset detection”, and decides to use this for a piece. Because of her UC Berkeley affiliation she also has access to additional software that is being developed in-house, and it not yet ready for release. Certain items, for example, a compelling demo patch, are marked as good pedagogical starting points, so she begins with these. As she works through these materials she fixes some bugs, adds missing documentation, and improves some help patches; these improvements are passed to a staff member who reviews them and checks them into CNMAT’s repository.
Her continuing interaction with CNMAT’s information organization allows her to customize her own curriculum and lead herself through it. As she starts developing her own software she is given her own private “sandbox” section of the repository so that she can keep track of her own revisions of her software, with the added benefit that CNMAT gets a permanent record of her work here. Eventually Joan learns enough to be given privileges to check in her own work directly, at which point she earns [cnmat:node/2763|technical researcher] status.
