Two years ago, a conversation between a daughter and her father happened like this.
Daughter: Appa, I want to study sound and music computation in Barcelona. They have an amazing research culture and lots to work in Carnatic music as well.
Father: I checked up on the Internet. Who goes to Barcelona when one can go to Germany, USA or even Australia? I am not sure.
Two years later, my dream of pursuing this course has come true. I studied electrical and electronics engineering at Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU) and started working as a research assistant at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. This was the place where I realised the importance of pursuing one’s dreams and studying further. I religiously wrote GRE, TOEFL, passionate statements of purpose and worked hard to get research papers published. While applying to universities, I realised that I did not want to pursue a generalised course of very-large-scale integration (VLSI), embedded systems and signal processing, because it had become common.
I then found a course on Sound and Music Computation in Barcelona, which was exactly what I wanted to do. After a lot of doubts and discussions, I joined the Master’s in Sound and Music Computation programme at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Barcelona.
The professors and PhD students, who are from different nationalities and research cultures, are amazing. The teaching methods are quite different from India.Instead of spoonfeeding of notes, it is all about reading on your own, clarifying doubts, writing your own code, testing it and make your own stuff. The professors help us at every level to do things on our own. What surprises me is that Carnatic classical music research, raaga classification and identification and tala identification are done on pure signal processing-basis. Only a few Indians work on it and the rest are from different parts of the world. My eyes lit up when a Bulgarian man said I annotated a varnam in Telugu language or my professor speaks about shruthi, raaga and thaala . Of course I have learnt about Turkish Makam music, jazz, and so on after coming here.
I also got a research assistantship job at the audio signal processing lab which aids the research mindset and adds to the pocket money.
Barcelona is amazing. I grew up in Bengaluru, so it is natural to draw a comparison. I have spoken Kannada all through my life and here people speak Catalan or Spanish. I thought English would save me, but this hasn’t been the case. I got really confused in a super market once, as all the names of the ingredients were written in either Spanish or Catalan. I stay with a Belgian, Moroccan and a half-Spanish-half Brazilian who are not proficient in English. I am picking up different languages from them.
Like every student, I cook on my own vegetarian food to save money. That’s one thing which is a little disappointing: less availability of vegetarian food. Of course, the vegan movement is catching up. And yes, moving to a different city does change you. I have made peace with eating cereals and bread in the morning, walking long distances, having a lot of patience, studying on my own and not depending too much on anyone .
The writer is pursuing Master’s in Sound and Music Computation at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona.
