09.30 - Mimi Concert Video Annotated

Video of the concert debut of Mimi with Isaac Schankler at the Boston Court Performing Arts Center in Pasadena on Saturday, June 5, 2010, as part of the People Inside Electronics concert event, Vicious Circles and Deadly Elements.

Mimi, which stands for multimodal interaction for musical improvisation, is a system for human-machine improvisation.  Mimi was created by Alexandre François using his Software Architecture for Immersipresence.

In Mimi, the computer learns from the human musician, creates a factor oracle from the music input, and recombines the material to generate improvisations like the music it 'hears'.  The visualizations show the music stream from the computer and from the human, the music material Mimi learns, and how the system recombines the material. 

The human musician determines when Mimi learns, when it starts/stops improvising, and the recombination rate.  The annotations in the video provided by Isaac shows this decision process, and reveals the improviser's thought process as the performance unfolds.

Isaac is a composer-pianist-improviser who received his DMA in Composition from the USC Thornton School of Music in 2010; he is currently a research consultant at MuCoaCo.

09.30 - Chinghua wins Grace Hopper Best Paper Award

MuCoaCo alum, Ching-Hua Chuan, receives the Grace Hopper Best New Investigator Paper Award at the Grace Hopper Celebration for her paper titled "Hybrid Methods for Generating and Evaluating Style-Specific Accompaniment." Ching-Hua is pictured above with Anna Huang (another MuCoaCo alum) and Sunny Tsai at the Grace Hopper Celebration 2010.

Ching-Hua was a doctoral student at the MuCoaCo Lab 2004-2008.  She was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Barry University 2008-2010, during which she was featured in the Barry Magazine.

Ching-Hua recently started a new job as Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at the University of North Florida.

Congratulations, Ching-Hua!

09.25 - CMS/ATMI Joint Meeting in Minneapolis

Elaine Chew gives the Technology Plenary Lecture at the Joint Association for Technology in Musical Instruction - College Music Society Joint Meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  While there, she met up with Katie Wolf.  Pictures to come ...

A review of ATMI 2010 by Barbara Freedman on MusicEdTech can be found here.  An excerpt from the review:

"The CMS/ATMI Technology Lecture/Plenary Speaker was Dr. Elaine Chew of USC (http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~echew/). Her session was entitled De-mystifying Music and Its Performance through Science and Technology. I don’t think I can describe how outstanding this presentation was in every aspect and detail. Her beautifully calm, confident manner had well placed humor. The multimedia slides and transitions to live display were outstanding and well paced. The content was so engaging and simply gorgeous to watch how she and her colleagues were able to conceive and capture a visual representation of music and human expression of music in various stages of creation and recreation. This presentation was a stunningly beautiful and a brilliant display of sheer intelligence, musicianship and grace. It left me speechless. Brava Dr. Chew."

09.24 - NAE US FOE Symposium

Elaine Chew was an invited speaker at the 2010 NAE FOE Symposium at the IBM Learning Center in Armonk, NY.

From September 23 to 25, 'about 100 outstanding engineers under the age of 45 met for an intensive 2-1/2 day symposium to discuss cutting-edge developments in four areas: Cloud Computing, Engineering and Music, Autonomous Aerospace Systems, and Engineering Inspired by Biology.'

Elaine's talk in the session on Engineering and Music was titled "De-mystifying Music and Its Performance."  The paper based on her talk and the presentation slides can be downloaded from the program website.

A version of the paper has been selected to appear in the winter issue of The Bridge, the NAE quarterly, which is 'disseminated to NAE members, government agencies, members of Congress, libraries, university departments, and a wide range of interested individuals (about 7,000 in all).'

These and more photos by the symposium photographer have been posted on the NAE Frontiers website.