It's all in the mix for computer science and music major Chris Erway

By Bill Steele

Chris Erway has been interested in both computers and music since second grade. By third grade he was being called to the principal's office to fix computer problems. By middle school he was jamming at the Jazz Institute of New Brunswick, N.J., near his home in Maplewood. In high school he was active in the "computer underground" of local bulletin board systems and editing an online humor magazine.

Senior Chris Erway blows on his trombone during a Collegetown gig with the band, The Continental. Photo courtesy of Chris Erway

When he arrived at Cornell, it seemed natural for him to choose a double major in computer science and music. Somehow he survived 23-, 24- and even 25-credit semesters and is now trying to figure out how to put his two interests together. Actually, three interests -- along the way he spent three years studying Chinese.

"I'm extremely optimistic," he said. "I have these three great skills. Cornell has opened up so many possibilities for me to pursue my interests; I see it as an open road to do what I want."

Erway's résumé bristles with computer skills, and most of his summers have been spent at various computer jobs, most recently at IBM's Extreme Blue program where he worked on Blue Gene, IBM's project to build a parallel computer with 4 million nodes.

His formal course work in music included study with visiting professor and noted jazz musician Donald Byrd and Cornell Professor Roberto Sierra, who "changed the way I listen to and write music," Erway said.

Meanwhile, he played in two bands: The Continental, which he describes as "soul/jazz/funk/jam," and Agent Double-O-Zero, a ska/punk/rock ensemble. He also has played with various Cornell jazz ensembles. Most of Erway's performing has been on the trombone, although he also plays piano, guitar, bass and a Chinese violin called the erhu. He hosted a ska-music show, "Ithacaska," on WVBR-FM. In the fall of 2001, he spent a semester at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, studying East Asian and Indian classical music.

In the summer of 2000, Erway, who is biracial, decided to pursue "the cultural quest of every half-Asian kid," he said, by studying Mandarin Chinese in Cornell's intensive Full-year Asian Language Concentration (FALCON) program. The following December, he toured China, returning with a heightened consciousness of his Asian heritage to launch Cornell Hapa (a Hawaiian word for a person of mixed blood), a group for people of any sort of mixed racial heritage. Another campus group focusing on the mixed-racial experience, BLEND (Bi-Multiracial Lineages, Ethnicities and Nationalities Discussion), was founded shortly thereafter. The two groups have been working together and will probably merge, Erway said. Cornell Hapa now offers a literary magazine, discussions, lectures, workshops and occasional cross-cultural food experiments like "Spam sushi."

Erway's first real attempt to put computing and music together is a senior project to build a computer music input device for trombone players in which positions on a touch pad represent the seven possible slide positions and the harmonics ordinarily controlled by keys. "I believe it would offer the frustrated trombonist an outlet for fast, piano- or saxophone-like runs generally uncharacteristic of the instrument," he said.

He has considered graduate programs in computer music but first will do something he found common among British students -- taking a "gap year." He will start with another summer at IBM working on Blue Gene, then possibly move on to a Chinese language program in China.