<p>AH, I knew I missed something. I’ve definitely heard a lot of good about Oberlin and experimental music (nothing about TIMARA in particular, though). The one problem I have with the course guide there (that I quickly skimmed) was the insistence of usage of Macintosh studio software; I think this is more of an industry standard thing moreso than a school decision, but it would still be tough for me to reconcile that with open source software; on the other hand, Stanford has its whole CCRMA center dedicated to just that. It would be near-sighted to limit myself to just that, but my focus is in that direction. Though they have a lot of singular focus on Max/MSP (as some of the courses at TIMARA seem to), the CNMAT at UCB seems great, and the location is great as well. Brown’s electronic music program looks like it places a pretty heavy focus on graduate work, but that’s just a general feeling from skimming the website. How stats focused are Berkeley and Brown with regards to transfers (as well as Stanford and Cal)? If they’re as much reaches as mamenyu makes Stanford and Cal out to be (which I don’t doubt), then I’ll definitely need some safeties as well.</p>
<p>But I’d like you guys to keep in mind that I’m open to ideas. My knowledge about colleges with strong electronic music programs is limited to a small subset of the world–I’ve got no idea about electronic music programs in the rest of the world, but knowing how much the IRCAM did, I’d wager that there are some pretty amazing programs in the rest of the world as well–even if it’s not realistic to go there, I’m still pretty curious about them.</p>