Artistic Director 

Teresa Marrin Nakra
Founder, Artistic Director
Immersion Music, Inc.

Dr. Teresa Marrin Nakra is an Assistant Professor of Music at The College of New Jersey. She has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the Massachusetts College of Art, and was recently a Clifton Visiting Artist at Harvard University. She holds both Ph.D. and M.S. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's acclaimed Media Laboratory, where she worked closely with Rosalind Picard, Tod Machover, John Harbison, and Marvin Minsky. She also holds a bachelor's degree with high honors in Music from Harvard University. She has received numerous distinctions for her academic work, including Research Fellowships from IBM, Motorola, and Interval Research Corporation.

As the Founder and Artistic Director of Immersion Music, Dr. Nakra has been bringing a high-tech interaction paradigm to classical and traditional music. Immersion Music has produced many live music events with digital enhancements, including a concert at Boston's Symphony Hall that attracted 2000 attendees. Immersion Music has also developed a museum exhibit in collaboration with the Boston Children's Museum and Boston Pops Orchestra, a Digital Salon series, and the Digital Conducting Laboratory at Arizona State University

As a conductor of contemporary and classical music, Dr. Nakra has recently served as the assistant conductor of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. She has been a featured performer of the Boston Cyberarts Festival on numerous occasions. As the culmination of her extensive doctoral study with the "Conductor's Jacket," she presented a live public performance with the Boston Pops Orchestra.

Publications

• Eric Lee, Teresa Marrin Nakra, and Jan Borchers. (2004).  You're the Conductor: A Realistic Interactive Conducting System for Children.  In NIME 2004 International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, Hamamatsu, Japan, June 2004. pdf
• Nakra, T. Marrin. (2003).   Immersion Music: A Progress Report.  New Instruments for Musical Expression Conference, McGill University, Montreal.
• Nakra, T. Marrin. (2002).   Musical Performance Applications of Affective Computing.  Invited Paper, Physiological Computing Workshop, CHI Conference on Human Facors in Computing Systems, Milwaukee WI.
• Nakra, T. Marrin. (2001).   The "Concerto for Conductor": a new musical form.  Invited Paper, Acoustical Society of America.
• Marrin Nakra, T. (2001).   Translating Conductors' Gestures to Sound.  Human Supervision and Control in Engineering and Music, September 2001.
• Marrin Nakra, T.  (2001).   Synthesizing Expressive Music through the Language of Conducting.  Journal of New Music Research, June 2001.
• Marrin Nakra, T. and Gary Hill.   (2000).   Quantitative Practice for Students at the Digital Conducting Laboratory.  Invited paper, Acoustical Society of America, Newport Beach, CA, December 2000.
• Marrin Nakra, T. (2000). Inside the Conductor's Jacket: Analysis, Interpretation and Musical Synthesis of Expressive Gesture. Ph.D. Thesis, Media Laboratory. Cambridge, MA, Mass. Inst. of Technology.   http://immersionmusic.org/HTMLThesis/Dissertation.htm  or    http://www.media.mit.edu/~marrin/HTMLThesis/Dissertation.htm
• Marrin Nakra, T. (1999). Searching for Meaning in Gestural Data: Interpretive Feature Extraction and Signal Processing for Affective and Expressive Content. Trends in Gestural Control of Music. Wanderley, M. and Rovan, B., eds., Paris, IRCAM.
• Marrin Nakra, T. (1999). Incorporating gestures into the musical control stream with the Conductor's Jacket. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 106, no. 4, part 2. Awarded Best Student Paper Award in Musical Acoustics at the meeting of the ASA in Columbus, Ohio, November 1-5 1999.
• Marrin, T. and R. Picard. (1998). The Conductor's Jacket: a Device for Recording Expressive Musical Gestures. International Computer Music Conference, Ann Arbor, MI, pages 215-219. http://www.media.mit.edu:80/~marrin/ICMC98.htm
• Marrin, T. and R. Picard. (1998). Analysis of Affective Musical Expression with the Conductor's Jacket. XII Colloquium for Musical Informatics, Gorizia, Italy, pages 61-64. http://www.media.mit.edu:80/~marrin/CIM.htm
• Marrin, T. and J. Paradiso. (1997). The Digital Baton: a Versatile Performance Instrument. International Computer Music Conference, Thessaloniki, Greece, pages 313-316. http://www.media.mit.edu:80/~marrin/ICMC97.htm
• Marrin, T. (1997). Possibilities for the Digital Baton as a General-Purpose Gestural Interface. CHI '97 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 311-312. http://www1.acm.org:82/sigs/sigchi/chi97/proceedings/short-talk/tm.htm
• Marrin, T. (1996). Toward an Understanding of Musical Gesture: Mapping Expressive Intention with the Digital Baton. M.S. Thesis, Media Laboratory. Cambridge, MA, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. http://www.media.mit.edu/~marrin/Thesis.htm,