Seeing Music: In Conversation with Robert Komaniecki

13 May, 2026

The Blue Hour: Musical Notation as a Visual Language

My first interview of the spring season of The Blue Hour is now available as a podcast.

In this conversation, I speak with Dr. Robert Komaniecki about musical notation — not only as a practical system for writing music, but as a visual language with its own history, beauty, and philosophical depth.

CiTR 101.9 FM / The Blue Hour
Recorded live on May 12, 2026

Listen to the interview on CiTR

Watch/listen on YouTube

The Blue Hour airs live every Tuesday at 2 p.m. on CiTR 101.9 FM and citr.ca.

Transcript lightly edited for clarity while preserving the natural rhythm of the live conversation.

Transcript

Farha Guerrero:
Let’s start with you, Robert. Who are you, and why do I think you are so cool?

Robert Komaniecki:
I’m Robert Komaniecki, and I teach both music theory and music history here at UBC. I have since 2023, as a lecturer. And I’ve been teaching all sorts of courses here, some like the history of popular music, some on more niche topics like 20th-century classical composition.

And this past semester, I was teaching some music theory courses and also a big course on video game music that was being offered to non-majors. That was a lot of fun. Lots of students from all over the university came in, and we had a really good time.

Here in the Vancouver community, I also occasionally get recognized on the street. I have an Instagram account where I make some videos about my experience coming up to Vancouver after living in the United States for the first 33 years of my life.

Farha Guerrero:
A keynote lecture that you delivered, if I’m not mistaken, quite recently at McGill University — I was just there very recently myself, in Montreal…

Let’s dive into that lecture, because I have a confession. I would have loved to have been sitting there listening to that lecture. And today on the show, we’re not going to play the many pieces, the beautiful, rich material that Robert played during that lecture. We’re going to talk about it instead.

But I got a sense that it was really full, and I can’t imagine that you didn’t get anyone who didn’t enjoy listening to it.

The lecture was not only beautifully written, but it really kept me engaged from beginning to end. And it is about something quite extraordinary: the idea that musical notation — so this is what we would see in a musical score — can be seen as a visual object, as something that has an enormous aesthetic value, and how it can even be understood without sound.

So let’s start there.

Robert Komaniecki:
Yeah, that’s right. It is about the idea of music notation, whatever that might be, serving some sort of artistic purpose, even if there is no sound accompanying it.

And so this keynote lecture that I gave at McGill was spanning, I think, the history of this practice from many centuries or even millennia ago up until the modern day, where music notation is often decontextualized and regurgitated as things like memes or in-jokes online.

And so there was a lot to cover, but my aim was to be as entertaining and as informative as possible.

Farha Guerrero:
And there’s something that you say. It’s about something called eye-music, which maybe you could define for us, because I think it’s a really good way to start thinking about this.

Robert Komaniecki:
Yeah, so eye-music refers to this idea of music that is not meant only to be heard, but music that has some sort of special appreciation that goes with the aesthetic or visual component of it.

Some early examples of eye-music might be something like a musical score that is written in darker ink to signify some sort of death or morbid topic. Or there’s this manuscript from, I think it’s the 16th century, by a French composer where it was a piece for, it was a love song, and he wrote it and he structured the musical beams in the shape of a heart.

And so that’s something that, if you were playing the music and you weren’t looking at the score, nobody would ever know. Nobody would know that you had music in the shape of a heart. It’s something that you can only appreciate if you were looking at the physical score itself, which I think is really interesting.

Farha Guerrero:
So in your lecture, you do exactly that. You bring in the history, but it starts off with actually this idea that an undiscovered composer, an American composer by the name of Heinrich, if I’m not mistaken—

Robert Komaniecki:
That’s right.

Farha Guerrero:
Very well known, arguably one of the most important of his time, but then was rediscovered, not necessarily through what we would think a classical composer would be discovered by in terms of his music, but was discovered through this idea of eye-music.

So the visual notation on his musical score became so popular. Can you talk about that?

Robert Komaniecki:
Yeah. So Anthony Philip Heinrich was this composer, this American composer. Some people think he’s the first full-time professional American composer.

And he was not particularly successful; he didn’t really achieve wide notoriety and wasn’t performed much beyond his death.

And then on this fateful day in 2022, a Twitter account named Threatening Music Notation shared a small excerpt from one of his pieces. And all of a sudden, millions of people were looking at the music of Heinrich, and it wasn’t because of the way his music sounds, it was because of the way his music looks.

There’s a piece by him that features the smallest notated note value in any Western music composition, which is a 2048th note.

So if anybody out there is listening, you might remember things like quarter notes and eighth notes and sixteenth notes. But if you keep on halving the values of that — 8, 16, 32, 64, and so on — until you get to a 2048th note, that is a very, very short note. It’s absurdly short.

And the reason that it was getting so much attention is that people who knew how to read Western music were looking at this and saying, this is absurd. This note would be like three milliseconds long. What was he thinking, composing something this bizarre?

And it brought a lot of attention back to his music and kind of shows how, without even hearing it, just looking at such a frankly intimidating or threatening musical score can start a lot of conversation.

Farha Guerrero:
And threatening is one word. There’s menacing as well in that lecture.

So it is very interesting that that Twitter account, which was started, I believe, in 2021, so five years ago now, had gained within about a year or two over 300,000 followers.

And it really became a community forum as well, where musicians started to share all kinds of things beyond even these sort of extraordinary notations that no one would ever expect to see.

Why don’t you tell us about that, but still stay with us a little bit about this idea that the visual notation itself was so striking to people…

As this Twitter account continued and more people started to share, you started to put these pieces together to say, well, music notation, even with no music being heard on social media — which is often a platform of audio in many respects — has some value worth researching.

And you’ve also said that even sometimes a thumbnail on YouTube that might just have music notation… people that may not even have the ability to read classical Western music are still drawn to it.

Robert Komaniecki:
You know, the McGill lecture ended with a big reveal, which was that I was the one who started Threatening Music Notation. And it was the Twitter account, and it was this funny moment where all the students in the lecture hall kind of smacked their forehead, like, “Oh, of course.”

But yeah, I was the one who started it. And my reasoning for starting it originally, besides maybe pandemic boredom, was also that I was interested in how people were responding to these decontextualized musical fragments.

And I was especially interested in why they were sharing these things, why they were sharing just pictures of sheet music with no attached audio. That was very interesting to me because I had always thought of a musical score as this sort of technical document, a set of instructions that you need to follow, and the music, the actual thing of value, is the sound that comes out of that.

And then all of a sudden I was seeing this large community forming around just the written instructions. And people were sharing it for all sorts of different reasons.

I think people love to share — for example, there was this piece that was shared. It was sort of a joke piece, Music for Celestial Trumpets by Tom Johnson. And it’s just a few notes that are absurdly high above the treble clef. So high. It’s many, many ledger lines higher than any instrument in the orchestra could ever play.

And it results in the score looking like a receipt from the grocery store. It’s like this really tall, long thing.

And people were sharing it, and I think the reason they were sharing it is partially because they wanted to show that they understood the absurdity of it. That it was kind of this demonstration of their technical proficiency in Western music notation.

They could be like, “Look everybody, I know enough about this that I understand that this is interesting. I understand that this is funny or absurd. I’m in on this joke.”

And so, I was watching this community of musicians form around this and kind of noticing the different things that they were drawn to. And I wasn’t really quite sure what to do, but it was really fun to sort of sit back and moderate the page and just watch and see which direction it went in.

Farha Guerrero:
I hesitated to say that you were the founder of that account because the surprise was wonderful to me too when I read your lecture. But of course, and I love how you sort of sneak it in, in a way that was quite a surprise even to someone that just read it.

But there were a couple accounts, Twitter accounts, that were trying to do the opposite of what you were doing… What was the name of the one?

Robert Komaniecki:
Well, there were a few.

Farha Guerrero:
There were a few, right. Spoof accounts.

Robert Komaniecki:
Spoof accounts, exactly. Yeah. There was Non-Threatening Music Notation, which would post images of kids’ music lessons, little music notes that have smiley faces in them and things like that.

And then there was the other account, Threatening Threatening Music Notation, which primarily just responded to my posts with threats against me, which I thought was pretty funny.

There was Confusing Music Notation. There was Reassuring Music Notation. It really kind of spawned a whole little mini universe of accounts that were kind of running with similar ideas.

Farha Guerrero:
It is fascinating, and I was trying to think a lot about music notation as something — because I’m someone who has studied a lot of languages, and Musqueam, I will say, was one of the ones I studied when it was first offered here at the University of British Columbia, a beautiful language to learn.

I can’t help but think about music notation as a sort of language, because I’m not a musician. And it made me wonder whether or not the appeal online for people wanting to see music notation in some way, even for those that cannot read it, they still click on the thumbnail just because of how it looks.

It made me think, is it also an interesting time in our lives where the visual is always part of the written as well?

Because if you look at social media, even short videos are now kind of laden with words in many cases. It’s almost like subtitles sometimes. And it could be because this way people can watch their reels or shorts without having to have headphones on, so they can still engage.

And I wonder if music notation is part of that.

Robert Komaniecki:
I think that’s a good observation.

It seems like in order to maximize the spread of something, you need to kind of universalize the mediums that it can be interpreted in. And so if somebody can’t audibly hear something, then being able to visually see it, that’s helpful.

And I think that music does have some things in common with languages in how people react to it. I think that people that speak certain languages enjoy the process of finding communities that share that language and signalling that they speak that language, much in the same way that musicians will sort of openly signal, “Hey, this is something that I can do. I’ve spent time to learn how to do this, and me being able to do this is my membership card into this little community.”

So I think there’s definitely some overlap there, even though typically we don’t say music is a language. Some people say music is the universal language, but a lot of music scholars kind of take issue with that just because of music’s differing uses across cultures.

Farha Guerrero:
Yeah, and we are, for the most part, talking about Western music notation, so just that clarification is important.

But let’s move it a little bit to this idea of the aesthetics…

For example, I have attempted to learn music, and the first time was last year. The first instrument that I decided to learn, if you can believe, was the cello. And little did I know that that was a difficult instrument for someone with no musical background.

But the bass clef, when I actually started to get the left hand going, I actually was really drawn to the way the bass clef looked.

It was so beautiful, and it reminded me of learning a language like Arabic, which I also studied here at UBC, because of the symbols that felt very flowy. Music notation on the scores felt very much like calligraphy.

Robert Komaniecki:
Yeah, it’s interesting hearing you talk about the bass clef as being this kind of beautiful thing, because I agree.

And yeah, that was a good clarification about us talking about Western music notation. It’s what a lot of people here in Canada would think of when they think of music notation, which are these dots with stems and the five lines and little flags connecting them and things like that.

And I agree. I think that these symbols are really quite beautiful. I love how they have so little in common with the alphabet that we’re working with on a day-to-day basis, but they are so internally consistent. It’s this really nice logical system.

There’s also repetition within it. Most music is repetitive, and that’s what people are drawn to, is repetition in music, that familiarity, and that’s reflected in the repetitive motifs in music notation as well.

And so, it’s understandable that people are drawn to it.

But I also think that over time, we have learned to associate Western music notation with beauty, with sophistication, with maybe a sort of erudite artistic sensibility.

Farha Guerrero:
You also bring music notation into a historical context, which is really interesting because in your McGill lecture you talk about how over the centuries musical scores would be painted, right?

15th- and 16th-century Italian paintings where images of musical books or scores are being held… They might be placed on a piano [or rather, an instrument or music stand], or they might even be in a choir formation where you’ve got people painted gathering around, looking at it.

But what was fascinating when I was reading your lecture was that sometimes the music, the notation, is either not discernible or legible, or it’s not even what you could make out as music. However, it plays a really important part in the painting, and for us to believe that it is of importance to be painted.

Robert Komaniecki:
And when people in the 15th and 16th centuries put music notation in their paintings, they were doing it for a few different reasons, but one of them was that they were trying to convey sophistication.

It was understood that if somebody was of this kind of educated class, that they would have more time to learn something like music.

And so if a painter could accurately convey music notation in their work, then that shows that the painter themselves was educated. And some painters even managed to sneak in their own compositions into their paintings, which I think is really cool.

But ultimately, over the centuries, it became this sort of shorthand where you see Western music notation and you know that that’s associated with sound, and you know that that is associated maybe with this kind of upper-class refined artistic sensibility.

Something that I might push back a little bit on nowadays, but at the time it was an artistically logical thing to do.

Farha Guerrero:
And we haven’t talked about other ways that music notation became an object of something quite visually beautiful.

So we can definitely say now that you’ll find music notation on wallpaper or people will have tattoos…

So I think there is so much to be said about what we started off the conversation with, with how music in its written form, in this Western context, is seen as something familiar, but also has entered our lives in a really intimate way.

Robert Komaniecki:
Yeah, absolutely.

And one of the things that interests me so much is that Western music notation has become such a symbol of music itself in our culture that it will be used to represent music that was actually never written using Western music notation.

So the example that I give in my lecture is from a children’s book about rappers. Almost no rap music is written using conventional Western music notation. It’s usually a mixture of a digital audio workstation and maybe typed or written-up lyrics, but not eighth notes, treble clefs, bass clefs, for the most part.

And yet in this children’s book, in order to show that there is music playing, there are little floating Western musical notes everywhere, as if that is the only way to visually show that there is music happening.

So it’s such a strong symbol that we often don’t have anything better than it to show that music is happening in this kind of visual sense.

The same thing goes for almost any music that you hear on the radio now. It’s almost always not going to be composed using Western music notation, at least not as the primary form of transmission. It’s a more eclectic mix of digital mediums and other things nowadays.

Farha Guerrero:
Now, for those of you who can read this stuff, which I know you do well because you’re also a music theorist, right? You teach music theory.

When you see music notation that is supposed to be a certain song, but maybe it’s not… it could be in a painting or an image, are you drawn to that kind of notation?

Robert Komaniecki:
Always. Yes.

And musicians love pointing this out where, for example, one thing that always makes the rounds in my email inbox are birthday cards.

Often one might see some sort of sheet music on a birthday card and then have the lyrics for the Happy Birthday song. But the sheet music will have nothing to do with the actual notes of the birthday song, just because whoever was designing the card thought, okay, I want the association with music to be there, but they maybe didn’t understand that the actual birthday song is going to look a certain way on a musical staff.

Another example is an Italian restaurant that had a fancy-looking menu. I think the restaurant was called like The Wolfgang or something like that, so maybe an association with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

But at any rate, they had some sheet music as a kind of wallpaper on the menu just to add this little extra veneer of sophistication, which works really well until you look more closely and you realize the sheet music is the theme song for The Flintstones.

Whoever designed their menu just looked it up and slapped it on there and didn’t realize that it had actual musical connotations beyond just sophistication.

Farha Guerrero:
And now something a little deeper.

These are questions that I am fascinated by because I don’t have music notation in my head when I hear a song. I have what a lot of people have when a song becomes part of a kind of internal memory and you can hear a song without seeing it or hearing it. It’s just in your head.

I met a Roman singer at the Rome airport once, and I didn’t realize how famous she was until we left. When we parted our ways, I started to listen to her music.

I decided to write her a letter and I said, how do we hear music in our heads when you wake up at four a.m. without actually hearing it? It’s something that’s quite fascinating to me.

I wonder, when you’re trained to read music, when you’re looking at a score silently, are you internally hearing the sound? And is there kind of an inner auditory imagination that comes about with that? Is there something happening internally?

Robert Komaniecki:
Yeah, I think most trained musicians will — but it definitely varies from person to person, and even very highly trained musicians might not hear, have an internal hearing of a piece of music after looking at it.

Part of what I teach is encouraging students to form those habits of looking at music and then trying to audiate it or hear it before they ever actually play it, just because that helps with things like rehearsing and performing.

Speaking for myself, when I look at a piece of sheet music, I generally have a vague and somewhat accurate representation of the music going on in my head.

There will usually be big gaps. If I look at an orchestral score, for example, and my eyes are scanning over it, an orchestral score is going to have many different instruments.

And so I’m not going to simultaneously be able to internalize the violin melody and the woodwinds’ countermelody and the viola harmony and the cello and the double bass and the percussion.

But my attention might bounce around, and so I’ll notice, “Oh, the violins have this staccato melody happening here,” and then it looks like the double basses take over with the answer here.

It’s the way that you could walk around a room in the dark and sort of approximate your surroundings even if you don’t have an exact representation of them.

Farha Guerrero:
You do say that the borders of music are more porous than any other art. What do you think exists beyond those borders, and why do you say that?

Robert Komaniecki:
I consider music to be porous because every time I think I have a clear and concise definition of music, something comes along that challenges that.

There have been things that I would say, “That is doubtlessly music.” And then the person making them says, “Not to me.”

And so then we’re kind of in this disagreement where the person that’s originating these sounds is like, “I don’t think that this is music.” And then to me, I do.

And we can’t ever necessarily reconcile those differences because of the subjectivity of art.

But also, my wife is also a music theorist, and she has done a lot of work on deaf musicians. And so often the first questions that people will ask her are, “How can deaf people ever make music?”

And it turns out that they can make music in a lot of different ways. Not all of those ways involve audible sound at all.

There are deaf musicians out there that will do an entire performance just with gesture, and that will be music to them. And if I had the opinion that that’s not music, that doesn’t undo their understanding of it as music.

My wife also talked to somebody who was deaf and blind. And when he was sitting with some friends in a jacuzzi and the bubbles turned off, somebody said, “Go turn the music back on.”

And so to them, that tactile sensation of bubbles was the music.

And so, to me, that doesn’t make any sense. But to them, it makes perfect sense. And neither of us is more right than the other. It just shows how broad that category of music can be.

Farha Guerrero:
Yeah, that’s beautiful, but you also say something at the end which really struck me as a writer, that you sort of challenge the notion that if music notation can be seen almost as something beyond the music and the sound, could we read a book of prose about, let’s say, a sculpture made of marble, maybe somewhere in Rome?

Or could we “see” a dance piece just by ear, just by listening to the music?

Robert Komaniecki:
Yeah, I spent a lot of time thinking about that way that we can just look at music notation and sometimes we don’t lose anything, sometimes we do, just by looking at it and not hearing it, but sometimes we even gain something.

And I haven’t been able to think as much about how that kind of medium transference might relate to something like sculpture.

What would it look like if we were to just listen to a lecture about sculpture, not ever seeing it, not being in the same room as it?

What would it look like if we were to look at a painting that’s a representation of a book?

Surely something would be lost there, but maybe something would be gained as well.

And so, I think that being willing to push an art out of its intended medium sometimes can bring us into really interesting places.

Farha Guerrero:
And then there’s this idea, which I didn’t say earlier, and it was a term I hadn’t heard of, but coined by psychologists. Was it the attention economy?

And so in this world where something like music notation, even if it’s just a small part of a larger score, can get so many likes and so much interest online, that is a testament to some of the challenges that you see at the end of your lecture.

Can we even look at art and feel art or see and imagine art in ways that wouldn’t normally be the way they’re intended to be?

Robert Komaniecki:
Yeah. I think for a lot of my peers, the idea of little snippets of music being decontextualized and then just kind of shared, maybe as an internet meme or something, is an upsetting one. They don’t like that idea.

And initially to me, it was a little bit uncomfortable as well.

And the idea of an attention economy is this idea that our attention is a valuable commodity that can be purchased, that companies are vying for, that we can give willingly, but our attention can also be stolen, and that it’s something that’s very worthwhile.

And when it comes to the ability of music notation to capture some of that attention, I was asking myself, can we use that knowledge and do something good with it? Are there things that we can do for the better of everybody, knowing that music notation can capture our attention in that way?

The things that I chose to do were things like using people’s attention and directing it towards fundraisers for musicians in need.

We fundraised enough money to purchase a whole professional oboe for a child down in Arizona.

We partially helped fund tuition for an aspiring violin builder, luthier, in Chicago.

People that weren’t going to be able to afford this musical path, and then because of this Threatening Music Notation Twitter account, they were.

And I think that’s really cool.

That doesn’t undo my discomfort with seeing music snipped up and decontextualized, but it just is another piece of the story for me.

Farha Guerrero:
Interesting. It’s a kind of a discord. There’s something that doesn’t feel right.

But yet at the same time, when you’ve got an academy of music, of people that want to protect what they feel is very sacred — the tradition, the evolution of Western music, for example — it might feel at odds with the new influencers on YouTube that have millions of people, where they could even be making musical scores for things that no one would ever imagine music to be in that form.

And so it becomes now accessible to people.

But at the same time, they’re working still in that same pathway of music.

So it is interesting because in some ways it feels — of course, there is a lot of absurdity that’s maybe beyond the seriousness — however, there is still a happy medium.

You mention one YouTuber in your lecture that has his TikTok channel, which is a little more in the absurdist sort of thing, but at the same time he’s got a serious YouTube music channel. He does both.

Robert Komaniecki:
Yeah, this is Score Follower, and he’s this composer and sort of content creator, and he will take normal moments or funny moments and transcribe them into Western music notation and then show the music notation underneath the video.

And sometimes the results are really funny because it’ll be this video of, I don’t know, a cat meowing sweetly, and then it’ll be transcribed in this exacting musical notation, so it looks like the cat is not just meowing, the cat is actually performing some precisely notated piece.

And so that draws people in. People are amused by that.

But then they might end up going into his pipeline and finding some music that’s composed by really interesting or even avant-garde new composers and checking it out because of his willingness to meet them where they are, which I think is great.

Farha Guerrero:
Let’s now talk quickly about this class that you mentioned at the beginning that you just taught. I’m really curious about it. When was it taught? You said you had students from all faculties. It was about video games?

Robert Komaniecki:
Yeah. It was the analysis of video game music course.

And it was our first time ever offering it at UBC. And we opened it up for 50 students outside of the Faculty of Arts, and it filled up just instantaneously.

Lots and lots of interest, which was a delight.

And these students came in from all these different backgrounds, and some of them had no musical background at all. Some of them had decades of musical training. Some of them had extensive tech training and some of them did not.

And so everybody had these different areas, these different strengths, and it was a fun challenge to draw out these different strengths in different people.

I wanted the class to be a bit of a survey that starts in the earliest bleeps and bloops of video game music, back when video games were contained in these massive arcade cabinets and the speakers might be this really primitive sort of oscillator that can only make one sound at a time.

And then moving all the way towards the modern day where video game music is no longer constrained necessarily by what the hardware can do.

If you want to record an orchestra for your video game, you can, as long as you have access to an orchestra.

That wasn’t the case for something like the Nintendo Game Boy, which only had four channels, three of which could play notes and the fourth was white noise.

And so composers used to have to get very creative. Not to say that they aren’t anymore, but they had strict limitations on what their machines could do.

And in some cases, the more complex your music got, the less complex the game had to get because memory was such a limited resource on these early machines.

And so teaching this class, it was kind of this trip through history, but we also did gameplay samples and responses in the classroom. I would set up game consoles and we would play and talk about the different sorts of effects and tricks that the composers used.

We had a student composer come in and demo some of the music that he had written for a project.

We had multiple students that were part of the Game Dev club show off their games that they had made in class, which was just so special.

I loved kind of just relinquishing the floor and letting them talk about what they had been doing.

And it was maybe the most fun I’ve ever had teaching a course because of that diversity of backgrounds.

And every day I felt like I was learning as much or more than they were because some student would come in and tell me something about the process of building a game that I had never considered before because I was too busy learning about string quartets and treble clefs and bass clefs during grad school.

And so it was a really great time being able to teach that course.

Farha Guerrero:
So you had students, when you say from all faculties, I can imagine from mechanical engineering?

Robert Komaniecki:
Yes, very cool. Plenty of people from computer science as well, and so they were my go-to people to help me build out my explanations if ever I was struggling with something relating to the coding issues or whatever.

But yeah, we covered everything from the physical properties of sound to the recording process for the Guitar Hero games. It was a really big class. It was a lot of fun.

Farha Guerrero:
I remember once driving on the Sea-to-Sky Highway and listening to the radio, and it was about the complexity of the video games that I grew up listening to in the ’80s and ’90s… something like Super Mario Brothers.

And it was a real epiphany to me that these composers, this one Japanese composer, it was composing music that was so intricate and complex and so difficult.

And it was really cool for me to hear that what you appreciate as a child as a very familiar sound that you play over and over again is actually very complex.

Robert Komaniecki:
Absolutely, yeah.

With something like the Super Nintendo, with the Super Mario Brothers franchise, that machine only had the ability to generate a couple of voices simultaneously.

And so if the composer wanted to give the impression that there was a lot going on, like a big ensemble playing, they would need to have one voice do many different things, jumping around, playing a melody, but also booping down and doing this lower arpeggio part.

Or if the composer wanted to give the impression of a trumpet being played, they couldn’t just sample a trumpet. That wasn’t something the machine could do.

Instead, they had to think, how can I make this little robotic-sounding square wave sound like a trumpet? How can I write for it in such a way that it makes people think of trumpet music, even if it literally sounds nothing like a trumpet?

And those challenges were so interesting and fun to talk about with the students.

Farha Guerrero:
So arguably… a really enjoyable class.

Robert Komaniecki:
Yes, yeah, definitely.

I’ve taught a video game course to the graduate and upper-level undergrad musicians for a couple of years. And that’s always been really great.

We end with this big final project where they can take it in all sorts of different directions.

And I had somebody make a video game that’s played with a recorder, like that you see in elementary school music classes. It was so much fun.

But then there was enough sort of interest and there was this opportunity to teach it to non-majors. And I said, yeah, let’s give it a shot.

And I’m really hopeful that eventually I can teach it again because it was a runaway success, much more so than I ever anticipated it would be.

Farha Guerrero:
If you have joined us, and it has been a pleasure, fifty minutes has flown by with Dr. Robert Komaniecki here from the UBC School of Music.

And it was exactly — this is exactly what I was expecting. You’ve got so much to offer here to UBC, and you are relatively new, right? A few years in Canada?

Robert Komaniecki:
That’s right.

Farha Guerrero:
And here to stay, we hope.

Robert Komaniecki:
We hope. Yes, hope against hope.

Farha Guerrero:
But you can reach out to him in many ways. You can contact him at the School of Music.

And we will hopefully have you back. What’s the best way for anyone that wants to get a hold of you?

Robert Komaniecki:
You could always just Google me. That’ll take you to my faculty page and my Instagram.

I’m the big guy with colourful shirts and a beard that comes up when you Google Robert Komaniecki, so it shouldn’t be too hard.

Farha Guerrero:
Thank you very much for your time and for coming out to the studio today. And we look forward to following up with you and seeing where the next adventure leads you.

Robert Komaniecki:
Great. Well, thanks so much for having me. It’s been really fun.