Mark Bocko

Affiliate Faculty, Music Theory Department; Chair, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department; Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The College, University of Rochester

Professor Bocko earned his PhD in Physics from the University of Rochester in 1984, and after a brief postdoc, joined the ECE department in 1985. Currently, he serves as the Department Chairperson. He has research and teaching experience in the areas of sensors and transducers, low-noise electronics, high speed digital superconducting electronics, quantum coherent electronics and quantum noise, microelectronic fabrication, microwaves, nonlinear dynamics, digital signal processing, musical acoustics, and digital audio.

Professor Bocko has enjoyed teaching courses on solid state devices, microwaves, nonlinear dynamics, circuits, DSP in audio, and engineering design. Currently, his teaching is in primarily in the latter two areas. Over the years, he was won three separate teaching awards at the University of Rochester.

Professor Bocko’s first love is music, and he has combined this with his research by co-founding the Music Research Laboratory, which conducts studies in the area of science and technology with music. The group’s projects range from creating machines that listen (automated transcription), to the physics of wind instruments and model based music synthesis and musical sound representations. They also have an active project on audio watermarking and steganography and their use for embedding meta-data in compressed and uncompressed sound formats. Bocko plays the bassoon and string bass.

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