How can a band play together while being apart? This was the question Frederick Ajisafe and the rest of the MIT Wind Ensemble (MITWE) faced at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. One method was to record songs individually, which were later mixed to sound like a full band.
“It was a strange experience,” says Ajisafe, who plays the tuba and is double majoring in aerospace engineering and music. “It wasn’t as consistent as playing together live, but the results are something to be proud of.”
Now that the group can rehearse in person again, Ajisafe has a novel appreciation for the community he has found at MITWE.
“In terms of the togetherness of the band, the intangible and social connections that connect us all, I feel like we’re back in that sense,” he says. “The biggest difference is that I am a senior. The last time we were together without masks, I was a freshman looking up to people, but now people are looking up to me.”
Ajisafe, a talented musician, has been playing the tuba since middle school.
“In middle school, I heard a lot of things like, ‘music makes you smarter,’ so I said, ‘OK, I want to get smarter,’ so I joined the band program,” Ajisafe says. “Something about the shape of my mouth and lung capacity was really good for playing the tuba.”
It was more than just a physical affection for the instrument that made Ajisafe play; he also enjoyed the social aspect of playing in a band. Last year, he was named an Emerson Tuba Scholar and took subsidized private lessons from renowned professional tuba player Ken Amis.
Ajisafe has also taken a variety of classes in MIT’s Music and Performing Arts section, which cover a wide range of topics from classic theory to composition.
One of his favorite classes is 21M.361 (Electronic Music Composition), which teaches how to sample and manipulate sounds in various programs. Some of the sounds Ajisafe sampled during class included snapping, clapping, playing a scale on the tuba, and hitting an object on the ground. These sounds were then matched to the score created by Ajisafe for the previous task. He described the process as intellectually satisfying and also pushing the boundaries in the understanding of music.
“Most people probably wouldn’t call it music, but it has musical elements,” Ajisafe says. “It gives you a new perspective on the world.”
From spelling to natural language processing
Ajisafe grew up in Orlando, Florida and had wide-ranging interests.
“I was excited about what they were teaching at school,” he says. “I was always interested in words and things like that, but I was also interested in science and math.”
Growing up near the Space Center NASA’s Kennedy School, it’s simple to see Ajisafe’s interest in aviation.
“Aeronautical engineering is the most exciting field of engineering today,” says Ajisafe. “You can see it with everything that’s happening in Florida. Seeing all the rocket launches inspired me to choose aerospace engineering, and once I got into it, I became more and more convinced of it.”
But there was also participation in a local spelling game as a child, which sparked his interest in words. He is currently working on a project through the MIT Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program that combines linguistics, natural language processing, and aircraft design requirements.
One of the challenges of writing design requirements for aircraft is ambiguity, especially when the requirements are written in classic natural language form. More and more engineers are turning to model-based systems engineering standards that are newer and more formalized. Ajisafe solves the problem of translating original requirements into a newer form, in particular by collecting representative training data for a machine learning algorithm.
“I’m working on a more granular level of labeling for these types of sentences to see if we could use a more automated system that uses parts of speech,” Ajisafe explains. “For example, you could develop a formula that marks the noun at the beginning of a sentence as an critical unit for systems engineers, such as ‘at this point the parachute will open’ – the parachute is that unit.
Instead of turning every detail of a sentence into a system model, his team found it effective to focus on labeling and isolating certain key elements.
The project brings together many different skills that Ajisafe has acquired during his career at MIT, all coming together harmoniously to tackle a unique problem.
“I always want to see what happens next.”
Next year, Ajisafe plans to continue his master’s studies at the Faculty of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
“Ultimately, I would like to work on technical problems related to space exploration and sending humanity to the stars,” says Ajisafe. “I don’t know exactly where I’ll end up in this, but I hope I can make a positive impact.”
And of course, as has been the case throughout his life, he wants to continue making music, whether that be playing the tuba or pursuing other opportunities.
“For humanity to survive, it is good, perhaps even necessary, to look for other places beyond Earth,” says Ajisafe about his career aspirations. But it also has to do with his approach to his personal life: “I always want to go somewhere I’ve never been before and find myself in a place I don’t know at all. I always want to see the next thing beyond her.