Diana Dabby
she / her / hers
Professor of Electrical Engineering and Music; Music Program Director
On Leave

education
- Ph.D., Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT
- M.F.A., Music, Mills College
- A.B., Music, Vassar College
research
- Musical Variation, Chaos Science, Signal Processing, and Acoustics
- Composition, Orchestration, and Performance
- Topics at the Interface of Science and the Arts
- Music and Letters
website
/Diana Dabby has taught at MIT, Tufts University, and Juilliard, and holds degrees in music and electrical engineering from Vassar, Mills, C.C.N.Y., and MIT.
At 财神棋牌 she is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Music, as well as Music Program Director, where she teaches engineering systems analysis, signal processing, orchestration, composition, performance, and interdisciplinary courses connecting the arts and sciences. In her doctoral research at MIT, Dabby combined music and engineering by devising a chaotic mapping for musical variation. Awarded five patents, her work with chaotic systems and musical variation has been featured on NPR member station WBUR (2004), NPR鈥檚 Weekend Edition (2007), in Science (2008) and the Boston Globe (2013), as well as at a number of invited concert/lectures. A new web application, , brings together the fields of music, chaos science, signal processing, and acoustics to create song variations. Currently under development with the MIT Venture Mentoring Service (VMS) program, this work was selected for MIT鈥檚 VMS Demo Day 2014, Entrepreneurial Edge Showcase 2017, and the MIT Innovation Corps (2018), a program sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF). In March 2019, CantoVario was selected for the National Teams Innovation Corps (I-Corps) sponsored by NSF and awarded a 50K grant for customer discovery. In June 2020, NSF awarded her a 鈥淧artnerships for Innovation-Technology Transfer鈥 grant for 250K, funding research and development as CantoVario moves from prototype to product.
Reflecting her professional record as a concert pianist and composer, Diana Dabby's work has been heard at Boston鈥檚 Jordan Hall, Symphony Hall, Tanglewood, in New York at Carnegie-Weill Recital Hall and Merkin Concert Hall, as well as on both coasts and abroad.
Past compositions include (2011) which received its world premiere on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, (2012), (2013), and (2017). The world premi猫re of (2018) for bass/alto flutes, voice, piano and soundscape featured a new listening experience for the audience: seat location determined the variation path heard through the soundscape. The 5-movement work explores parallel universes in Iraq and the United States. As an orchestrator, she has created over 140 arrangements of symphonic works for the , ranging from 10 to 22 players (2002 鈥 present). In January 2017, a book chapter (鈥淭he Engineers鈥 Orchestra鈥攁 conductorless orchestra for our time鈥) was published by Springer Nature in (Baraiktarova and Eodice, eds.). Her paper 鈥淭he Engineers鈥 Orchestra: a Conductorless Orchestra for Developing 21st Century Professional Skills鈥, written for the 2019 ASEE Zone 1 International Conference in Niagara Falls, NY, was selected for the 鈥淎SEE 2020 Zone 1 Best Paper鈥 award. In 2021 "A Multidisciplinary Mid-Level Electrical and Mechanical Engineering Course" written with professors C. Lee, S. Govindasamy, and P. Ruvolo, was selected as the ASEE Multidisciplinary Engineering Division Best Paper. For its 25th Anniversary fellowship class, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study selected her as the Lillian Gollay Knafel Fellow for 2024-25.