- This event has passed.
Hoboken Talks: Rob Harari – music producer, composer & educator
February 6, 2023 @ 12:00 am
Hoboken Talks broadcasts on the 2nd and last Thursday of each month. Join us online Thursday, February 23 at 7pm when Jack Silbert chats with Rob Harari. Rob has had an extensive career in music production for the recording industry and theater. His is also Program Director and Industry Professor of Music & Technology at Stevens Institute of Technology. We’re thrilled that he is our next Hoboken Talks guest! Participate live using “Chat” on YouTube or by “Commenting” on Facebook.
After graduating from NYU in 1983 with a dual degree in Musicology and International Relations, Rob Harari dove straight into the music business as a recording studio intern. Harari has logged a lifelong career as musician, music producer and audio engineer, studio owner, production manager/FOH engineer for Gregory Hines, and educator. In addition to touring with Gregory Hines for 18 years, Harari has worked with Savion Glover in “Bring In ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk (4 Tony Awards 2006), Live (Barbra Streisand), Cannes Film Festival, the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, & the Spike Lee film “Bamboozled”. He continues to work as creative director for numerous artists and performance events.
Harari has been fortunate enough to work on multiple Grammy nominated albums, Emmy Award winning programming for children educational content on PBS and musical themes for major sporting events. Composition credits include soundtracks for documentaries, and songs composed individually and collaboratively for albums ranging from rock, pop, and jazz to spoken word.
This background made him unusually well suited for his next career as Program Director and Industry Professor of Music & Technology at Stevens Institute of Technology. Interdisciplinary collaboration at Stevens opened an entirely new world in research.
Working with the Chief of Surgery in ICU at Hackensack University Medical Center, Harari spent two years analyzing the acoustical profile of four different hospital environments to see if there is a connection to the onset of delirium and cognitive impairment. This work resulted in a joint Conference paper presentation at the Institute of Noise Control 2014.
For the centennial celebration of Claude Shannon at Nokia Bell Labs in 2016, serving as Artistic Director, Harari, and collaborator Dr. Paul Wilford, Senior Director of Audio-Visual Research, rekindled the E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) program to create new performance technologies with the first performance since Merce Cunningham in the 1960’s. Teams from Bell Labs and Stevens, using video analytics and accelerometers worn by live performers on stage, to create an automated production package of lighting control, projection mapping and audio spatialization, all through transcoding the artist’s movement directly to the production consoles control surfaces.
In August 2017, Harari received a $500K National Science Foundation award to develop a multimedia curriculum for high school students to inspire interest in STEM education. The outreach focused on schools that serve underrepresented minorities and girls in STEM education.
Harari’s current research in psychoacoustics, pairs him with neuroscientists, biomedical engineers and performers to analyze the impact of different aural frequency spectrums on the human condition. Differing from musical therapy, the research focusses on the sonically induced change in one’s chemical balance and the resulting physiological effects.
Rob Harari currently sits on the Board of Directors for Music For All Seasons-an organization that works with veterans and incarcerated youth to provide therapy through song writing, The United Jazz Foundation–an organization that works with inner city youth on the US Virgin Islands to teach them jazz as an alternative to gang life. and advisory boards of The Tap Legacy Foundation and African Views. He served on the Board of Directors for the United Synagogue of Hoboken for seven years before serving as President from 1997-1999.
Past episodes may be replayed any time on YouTube. Like, Subscribe, and “Ring That Bell” to receive notifications of all our video events.