David S. Mash started playing guitar at age 7. At 11 he studied with noted classical guitarist AndrÈs Segovia. Growing up as a teen in Detroit, he worked at Motown. As a University of Mchigan pre-med student, he taught guitar privately. He switched to music and attended Berklee in 1973 as a composition major, teaching guitar while still a student. Ironically, the former pre-med student had “a run-in with a doctor” and temporarily lost the use of his left hand. He turned to keyboard and then music technology. Today he administers information technology throughout the ever-expanding Berklee campus—4000 students making music every day-- but he also shares his experience in venues like MacWorld Expo. We met at his Berklee headquarters.

I: How did Berklee’s connection with Apple Computer develop?

DM: We were using computers in the curriculum back in late 1982, with the Apple II, so when the Macintosh came out, we were probably one of the first music schools to jump on the bandwagon and see its value. One of my students was involved with writing the first sequencer program for the Macintosh– his name was Roy Groth and he worked at Mark of the Unicorn [www.motu.com] developing a program called Performer, which is now called Digital Performer.
I built our first Music Synthesis Lab in late 1985, with 18 Mac Plus machines. I started doing events at MacWorld in 1987, and again, in a really big way in the late 90’s. Apple had a program called AppleMasters, and they invited me to be one of the original AppleMasters, which was great. I’ll never forget, the first time I went out to Cupertino for the program inaugural, they had us assemble in the hotel lobby, and we all rode to the Apple campus– a limo with Muhammed Ali, Michael Crichton, Richard Dreyfuss, Jennifer Jason-Leigh, Gregory Hines—and me!
After a whole day at Apple I called my wife: “You’ll never guess who I spent the day with!” She couldn’t, so I read her the names, and she asked “So why are you there?” [Laugh] That’s how I felt, too.

I: Your newest policy for incoming students mandates that they be armed with an Apple PowerBook?

DM: It becomes kind of like a textbook decision. If you’ve got somebody teaching say math, you’d want everyone in the class using the same math textbook, you’ll know that everyone is on the same page. Same thing here. We need to make sure that all students will have the same platform, the same operating system, the same software and version. And many activities involve specific system extras like QuickTime which are very robust for music but not completely cross-platform. From an educational perspective we have to mandate the best platform. And we expected there would be some push-back.

I: Have you gotten any resistance?

DM: No; in fact most parents I talk to thank us for telling them what to get. Many would make the decision based on other factors. And they’d end up spending the same amount of money, and maybe more, and get the wrong machine.
We chose the PowerBook over the cheaper iBook because music work places a fairly significant hit on the CPU. What we did to help make it as palatable as we could was, we went to bat with buying power.
We’re in the process of ordering another 1300 units for this year; we distributed 2200 units last year. This year we’re offering the 1.33 GHz G4 PowerBook, 15” screen, 512 MB RAM, 60 GB hard drive, DVD SuperDrive, and Airport Extreme for wireless networking. Not exactly a stripped down model.

I: The whole school is a wireless hotspot?

DM: [Laugh] I used to watch the truckers drive up along the building and check their email. Now it’s a closed network, you have to log in with a student name and password. But all of our campus is covered. So a student can open their laptop, log into the server and do their ear training work anywhere.
As part of the laptop package we include an M-Audio Oxygen-8 MIDI keyboard controller. So students have a complete music production tool.

When I came to Berklee in 1973, I thought it would be great to have a keyboard, to practice harmony and ear training stuff, and I went out and bought a used Wurlitzer electric piano for about $800. It died after about a year and it was so heavy to move from my apartment. So came the idea of having something that’s really light and portable that connects to the computer, and sounds like a full piano or anything you want.

A month into the PowerBook program, I got a request to meet with the student governance organization. They wanted us to add furniture into the practice rooms—to put their laptops. The music stands weren’t stable enough.

I: They were using sheet music stands for their PowerBooks?

DM: Yep. I was interested to see students in practice rooms with their laptops open, with the sheet music on screen as a PDF file, propped on a stand—rather than carrying around a big heavy fake book.

I: So you almost let the population tell you what the needs are?

DM: I have two daughters. One thing I learned quite a long time ago, even if you’re the most technologically-savvy and interested person like I am – geek that I am -- there’s still a big part of your life that you lived, without this kind of technology. This was never new to my kids; they always had a computer, in their memory. And so they do things differently with it. I want to watch for that and support it as best I can.

One of the first surprises was iTunes. Now, you and I use iTunes to store music, play it, and organize it and maybe transfer it to an iPod on Mac or Windows, things like that, Well, the students instantly found out that, because of the seamless wireless network across the whole campus, that they could turn on iTunes sharing… and created an anarchistic radio station! Whoever has their computer open and is sharing their creations is accessible. Now, I wouldn’t have thought to look for that.
So one of the first things that came up right away was: student internet radio station.

I: And that’s happening?

DM: Yep, there’s a group together, there’s a course to be offered in the fall that will give credit for participating. We put a Shoutcast server in place, and in a few weeks we’ll be posting the server link.

I: How do you think Berklee rates in terms of technology among other music schools?

DM: I think we have more technology per square foot than any other music school in the world, and it’s more integrated into the curriculum, and more into the life of the college than any other place. I would challenge anyone to disprove that– and if successful I would go and learn from those people!
We prepare students for real careers in contemporary music, everything you do in the business these days is touched by technology. Learning, conception, composition, recording, distribution. A lot of schools are doing good things, don’t get me wrong, but at the scale that we’re doing it, we’re unique.

I: There must be a few luddites in school. Are you in charge of assuaging the grumblers?
DM: I am the Vice President for Change. [Laugh] Sometimes that’s good, sometimes not. Change is often difficult. It’s really easy to buy stuff if you have money; it’s really hard to change the way people think; that’s the challenge, getting them to think differently.

I: Can you speak to Berklee’s distance learning initiative?

DM: We have an online school, opened last January, and we’ve had about 1600 students enrolled in courses. We offer about 60 undergrad courses, kind of like an extension school model. These are courses in music production and the music business. All done over the internet, yet instructor-led.
There’s a weekly chat with the instructor in real-time, and ongoing discussion boards between students and teachers. We have a lot of immersive media in the coursework; a lot of movies, animation and audio that instructs. We’re starting to offer extension school credit. We’re not doing it yet but we’re exploring graduate programs.

I: Berklee is also linked to affiliate and partnership programs with schools all over the world, using ISDN lines, teleconferencing equipment featuring remote camera control. Where is that going?

DM: We’re just completing right now our physical connections to Internet 2, which started as a research project to be the successor to the internet. It’s geared toward high speed interaction. Right now it’s pretty much just in the university environment, but it’s a 20Gbit/second backbone, very fast considering the average broadband rate consumers currently use is around 1 Mbit/second. Our first experiments will be in September. We actually hope to have some singers in Los Angeles singing with the band here, in front of an audience. In theory, no delay, no latency. Response has to be under ten milliseconds in order for it to feel right, and we think we can do that. Our goal then is to conduct real master classes, where students can play with distant instructors and vice versa. That gives distance learning a whole new feel.

I: Our next stop here at Berklee is Don Wilkins at Film Scoring. Any thoughts on the evolution of that department?

DM: Don will show you a lot of interesting things. We have specialized facilities that are really geared toward the immediate needs of a specific discipline. We ask ‘How do we support that department?’ For instance, Film Scoring was the first department on campus to get a storage area network. It makes sense for them to have their video stored on a central server so their students can write to that storage space.