Studio 01
How Music Finds You
Taste, culture, identity, and the algorithms of listening
Six days. Deep listening, fieldwork on campus, and a music recommendation engine you’ll build by hand.
When
20–25 July 2026
Six full days · 10am–5pm
Where
CU Global Campus
Devanahalli, Bengaluru
You earn
2 Credits
Certificate of Completion
for external participants
Open to
All Students
UG, PG, PhD across schools + external participants
What you’ll do
Bring music you already love. Revisit it critically — through deep listening, peer conversation, short musicology lectures, and exposure to unfamiliar genres. Together with your cohort, build a shared “taxonomy of taste” — a vocabulary for describing music. Then turn the studio into a fieldwork lab: interview classmates, faculty, and staff about music they enjoy, avoid, and admire. Use that data to manually build a small-scale replica of Spotify’s recommendation logic. Generate recommendations, play them back to your interviewees, and evaluate what worked and why.
What you’ll make
A team Recommendation Dossier containing:
- Interview findings
- The shared taxonomy your cohort invented
- A simple data table or chart
- 3–5 music recommendations for a chosen listener profile
- An assessment of how those recommendations performed and a hypothesis of why
Plus a short individual paper articulating how your understanding of music, taste, and identity has changed — including a “new ears” playlist with annotations.
Your six days
| Mon | Listening calibration. Begin building a shared vocabulary for taste. |
| Tue | Compare unfamiliar genres. Refine the taxonomy. Form teams. |
| Wed | Fieldwork — each student interviews 3–5 people on campus. |
| Thu | Tabulate data into three matrices. Generate recommendations. |
| Fri | Play recommendations back to interviewees. Evaluate. Complete dossiers. |
| Sat | Final presentations. Reflective papers. Closing discussion. |
Sessions are full-day (approx. 10am–5pm). No more than 1–2 hours of theory per day; the rest is hands-on.
Who it’s for
Open to students with varied musical backgrounds — no prior formal training assumed. The course does assume curiosity and a willingness to listen carefully, debate respectfully, and work collaboratively. The instructor will adjust to the mix of musical knowledge in the room.
Pre-course readings, listening, and an introductory questionnaire may be assigned.
Your instructor
Dr. Srijan Deshpande
Research Affiliate, Arts Division (Music Department), UC Santa Cruz
Dr. Srijan Deshpande is a Hindustani Khayal vocalist, teacher, and scholar. He has studied music with his father, Pt. Satyasheel Deshpande, and performs and teaches out of Fremont, California. He holds a PhD in musicology and is currently writing a major biography of Pt. Kumar Gandharva with the support of a New India Foundation Book Fellowship.
Through his father’s teaching and their work at the Samvaad Foundation — an archive of over 5,000 hours of recorded Hindustani music — he has spent more than a decade in the preservation, documentation, and dissemination of Hindustani music, and has been a recipient of a research fellowship from the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, for studying and documenting various Gharana traditions.
Registration Opens
20th May 2026
- Free for CU students
- Paid for external participants
Questions about a Studio?
Reach out to the Studios Coordinator. Happy to talk through any of the courses, what to expect day-to-day, or whether a particular Studio fits where you are in your learning right now.
Studios Coordinator
Anand K Sharma
cu.studios@chanakyauniversity.edu.in
+91 88930 33233
Campus
Chanakya University Global Campus
NH-648, Haraluru–Polanahalli
Near Kempegowda Intl. Airport
Devanahalli, Bengaluru — 562165