How does an ensemble play music together while apart? This was the query facing Frederick Ajisafe and the remainder of the MIT Wind Ensemble (MITWE) at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. One method was to individually record tracks that were later mixed together to sound like a full ensemble.
“It was an odd experience,” says Ajisafe, who plays the tuba and is pursuing a double major in aerospace engineering and music. “It wasn’t as cohesive as playing together in person, but the outcomes are something to be happy with.”
Now that the group is capable of rehearse in person once more, Ajisafe has a renewed appreciation for the community he has found inside MITWE.
“So far as the togetherness of the ensemble, the intangible and social connections that all of us have, I feel like we’re back in that sense,” he says. “The most important difference is that I’m a senior. The last time we were together without masks, I used to be a freshman looking as much as people, but now individuals are looking as much as me.”
An completed musician, Ajisafe has been playing the tuba since middle school.
“In middle school, I heard quite a lot of things like ‘music makes you smarter,’ so I said, ‘okay, I need to be smarter,’ so I joined the band program,” says Ajisafe. “Something about my lip shape and my lung capability was really good for the tuba.”
It was greater than only a physical affinity for the instrument that kept Ajisafe playing; he also loved the social aspect of playing in an ensemble. Last yr, he was accepted as an Emerson Scholar in tuba performance, receiving subsidized private lessons with renowned skilled tuba player Ken Amis.
Ajisafe has also taken a wide range of classes in MIT’s Music and Theater Arts section that cover a wide selection of topics, from traditional theory to composition.
One in every of his favorite classes is 21M.361 (Electronic Music Composition), which teaches methods to sample and manipulate sounds in numerous software. A number of the sounds Ajisafe sampled throughout the course of the category include snapping, clapping, playing a scale on his tuba, and slamming an object on the bottom. Then, those sounds were fit to a rating Ajisafe created for a previous task. He described the method as intellectually satisfying, in addition to pushing the envelope in how he understands music.
“Most individuals probably wouldn’t call it music, but it surely has musical elements,” says Ajisafe. “It gives you a brand new perspective on the world.”
From spelling bees to natural language processing
Ajisafe grew up in Orlando, Florida, and had a wide selection of interests growing up.
“Whatever they were teaching at school, I used to be enthusiastic about,” he says. “I used to be all the time concerned with words and things like that, but I used to be also concerned with science and math.”
Growing up near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, it’s easy to see how Ajisafe cultivated an interest in aerospace.
“Aerospace engineering is probably the most exciting field inside engineering right away,” says Ajisafe. “And you’ll be able to see it with all the stuff happening in Florida. Seeing all of the rocket launches inspired me to select aerospace engineering and once I got into it, it confirmed that increasingly more.”
But there was also a childhood participation within the local spelling bee that tickled his interest in words. Now, he’s working on a project, through MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, that mixes linguistics, natural language processing, and aircraft design requirements.
One in every of the challenges of writing design requirements for aircraft is ambiguity, especially when the necessities are written in traditional, natural language form. More engineers are turning to model-based systems engineering standards, which is newer and more formalized. Ajisafe is tackling the issue of translating the unique requirements into the newer form, specifically, putting together representative training data for a machine learning algorithm.
“I’m determining the more granular level to label these varieties of sentences to determine if we could use a more automatic system using parts of speech,” Ajisafe explains. “For instance, possibly you’ll be able to devise a pattern that labels a noun at first of a sentence because the entity vital to systems engineers, like ‘the parachute shall deploy at the moment’ — the parachute is the entity.”
As an alternative of converting every detail of the sentence to a system model, his team has determined that it’s effective to give attention to labeling and extracting certain key elements.
The project combines many various skills that Ajisafe has picked up throughout his MIT profession, all coming together in harmony to tackle a singular problem.
“I all the time wish to see the following thing beyond”
Next yr, Ajisafe plans to pursue his master’s degree through the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
“Ultimately, I would really like to be working with the technical problems related to space exploration and getting humanity to the celebs,” says Ajisafe. “I don’t know exactly where I slot in that, but hopefully I can have a positive impact.”
And naturally, prefer it’s been throughout his life, he desires to proceed doing music, whether or not it’s playing tuba or trying other outlets.
“For humanity to survive, it is nice and possibly even essential to hunt down other places besides Earth,” Ajisafe says with reference to his profession aspirations. But, it connects to how he approaches his personal life as well: “I all the time wish to walk out somewhere I’ve never been before and be in a spot that I’m completely unfamiliar with. I all the time wish to see the following thing beyond.”