Diana Dabby

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 Olin 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’s 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, CantoVario, 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’s 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 “Partnerships for Innovation-Technology Transfer” 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’s 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 September Quartet (2011) which received its world premiere on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, Tre Studi di Colore (2012), Fuente y Variación (2013), and Who was Wissam Eid?  (2017). The world première of Parallel Voices—Distant Mirrors (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 Olin Conductorless Orchestra, ranging from 10 to 22 players (2002 – present). In January 2017, a book chapter (“The Engineers’ Orchestra—a conductorless orchestra for our time”) was published by Springer Nature in Creative Ways of Knowing in Engineering (Baraiktarova and Eodice, eds.). Her paper “The Engineers’ Orchestra: a Conductorless Orchestra for Developing 21st Century Professional Skills”, written for the 2019 ASEE Zone 1 International Conference in Niagara Falls, NY, was selected for the “ASEE 2020 Zone 1 Best Paper” 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.