06.09 - Anna Huang gives ICMC Keynote

Anna Huang is a keynote speaker at the 50th International Computer Music Conference held in Boston, Massachusetts, from 8-14 June 2025.

“Algorithms and Interaction for Human AI Creative Partnerships”

Monday, June 9, 3:30pm – 4:30pm
Blackman Auditorium, Northeastern University

Cheng-Zhi Anna Huang 黃成之
Assistant Professor of Music
Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Music and Theater Arts
School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In Fall 2024, Cheng-Zhi Anna Huang 黃成之 started a faculty position at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with a shared position between Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Music and Theater Arts (MTA). For the past 8 years, she has been a researcher at Magenta in Google Brain and then Google DeepMind, working on generative models and interfaces to support human-AI partnerships in music making.

Anna Huang is the creator of the Machine Learning (ML) model Coconet that powered Google’s first AI Doodle, the Bach Doodle. In two days, Coconet harmonized 55 million melodies from users around the world. In 2018, she created Music Transformer, a breakthrough in generating music with long-term structure, and the first successful adaptation of the transformer architecture to music. Huang’s International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) paper is currently the most cited paper in music generation.

Anna Huang was a Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) AI Chair at Mila (Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, now Mila Quebec AI Institute), and continues to hold an adjunct professorship at the University of Montreal. Huang was a judge then organizer for the AI Song Contest 2020-22. She did her PhD at Harvard University, master’s at the MIT Media Lab, and a dual bachelor’s at the University of Southern California in music composition and CS.

09.27 - Anna Huang Assistant Professor @ MIT

Anna Huang, MuCoaCo alum, joins MIT's departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Music and Theater Arts as an assistant professor in September 2024 after eight years with Google Brain and DeepMind where she spearheaded efforts in generative modelling and reinforcement learning, and human-computer interaction in support of human-AI musical partnerships. Anna is creator of Music Transformer and Coconet, which powered the Bach Google Doodle. She holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Mila. Anna holds a BM in music composition and BS in computer science from the University of Southern California, an SM from MIT, and a PhD from Harvard University.

At MIT, Anna is collaborating with Eran Egozy to devlop and launch MIT's new Music Technology and Computation Graduate Program at the intersection of music, computing, and technology. The program comprises of two two-semester master's degrees – a thesis-based Master of Science program available only to MIT undergraduates, and a coursework-based Master of Applied Science open to all students – and a PhD in MIT's School of Engineering.

“As a composer turned AI researcher who specializes in generative music technology, my long-term goal is to develop AI systems that can shed new light on how we understand, learn, and create music, and to learn from interactions between musicians in order to transform how we approach human-AI collaboration,” says Huang. “This new program will let us further investigate how musical applications can illuminate problems in understanding neural networks, for example.”

09.09 - Isaac Schankler Assistant Professor @ Cal Poly Pomona

Isaac Schankler --> isaacschankler.com

Isaac Schankler, affiliated artist / postdoctoral research affiliate at the Music Computation and Cognition Lab at the University of Southern California (USC), and visiting scholar at the Music Performance and Expression Lab at QMUL's Centre for Digital Music (C4DM) has accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Music Industry Studies at Cal Poly Pomona in California, USA.

Congratulations, Isaac!  A composer, accordionist, and electronic musician, Isaac's electronic-acoustic composition Pheremone has received glowing reviews on Fanfare Magazine, his generative game music techniques have been reviewed on Billboard and presented at GameSoundCon, and he is founder and artistic director of People Inside Electronics in Los Angeles.  He is also an erudite writer of opinion pieces for NewMusicBox and was winner of 2013 was a winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for excellence in music journalism.

Photos of Cal Poly Pomona by Isaac Schankler:

08.01 - Ching-Hua Chuan promoted to Associate Professor @ UNF

Ching-Hua Chuan, an alumnus of the Music Computation and Cognition Laboratory at the University of Southern California, has received tenure and been promoted to Associate Professor in the School of Computing at the University of North Florida. As in most institutions in the United States, academics on tenure track in computer science (and most engineering fields) are hired as assistant professors without tenure (in a probationary period), and are evaluated after five years for promotion to associate professor with tenure in the sixth year in a highly competitive process.  Congratulations, Ching-Hua!

Ching-Hua is received her PhD from the Department of Computer Science at USC, where she received a Digital Dissertation Award and was elected to Phi Kappa Phi honor society. Her research interests center on artificial intelligence and machine learning, and her projects range from style-specific music harmonization to sign language recognition. She is recipient of a Grace Hopper Celebration Best New Investigator Paper Award, and her work has been featured on Foxnews, MSNBC, the Telegraph, the Miami Herald, and the IEEE Intelligent Systems Magazine. A innovative educator, she is also recipient of UNF's Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award and has developed new courses on music informatics and on gaming and mobile app development.

Read more about Ching-Hua's work at www.unf.edu/~c.chuan.

09.26 - Academic Minute Features MuCoaCo Alum Ching-Hua Chuan

MuCoaCo alum, Ching-Hua Chuan, Assistant Professor of Computing at the University of North Florida speaks on Composing with Computers on The Academic Minute with Lynn Pasquerella, President of Mount Holyoke College.  The Academic Minute features a different professor each day, giving anecdotes and updates on groundbreaking scientific research.

Ching-Hua Chuan's segment aired today on WAMC Public Radio in New York and on more than 60 radio stations across the United States.  Hear it at:
academicminute.org/2014/09/ching-hua-chuan-university-of-north-florida-composing-with-computers

04.26 - Digital Da Vinci Book Chapter on Mimi

Schankler, Isaac, Elaine Chew, and Alexandre R. J. Francois. (2014). Improvising with Digital Auto-scaffolding: How Mimi changes and enhances the creative process. In Newton Lee (ed.): Digital Da Vinci—Computers in Music, 99-125, Springer. ISBN 978-1-4939-0535-5. DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4939-0536-2_5.


Access Options

Individual chapter: SpringerLink Hardcover book: Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk

Abstract: This chapter poses, and proposes some answers to, questions about the origins and nature of creativity when digital media takes an active role in the music-making process. The discussions are centered on François’ Mimi (Multimodal Interaction for Musical Improvisation) system, which enables a musician to seed the computer with musical ideas and then improvise atop re-combinations of these ideas; the system provides the musician with visual foreknowledge of the machine’s intent and review of the interaction. They extend to the different instantiations of, and extensions to, the Mimi system, which are designed with various interaction nuances in mind, and engender new forms of creativity. We review each Mimi version, from the original blue-and-white silhouette display, to the Scriabin-inspired varicolored panels, to the multi-paneled user-directed Mimi4x. In each scenario, we consider the impact of Mimi on the creative process and the resulting performance; specifically, we describe the interaction between a performer, the composer (when this is different from the performer), and the system, analyzing the techniques used to successfully negotiate a performance with Mimi, and the formal musical structures that result from this interaction.


Supplemental material (video):

Analysis of performance with Schankler and Mimi.

04.02 - MuCoaCo alum Ching-Hua Chuan discusses style identification in pop/rock music

MuCoaCo alum Ching-Hua Chuan, now an Assistant Professor of Computing at the University of North Florida, discusses her research on a identifying style in pop/rock music through a multi-modal approach on “UNF On The Record,” a weekly radio show featuring campus life topics and faculty and student research.

To hear the interview, visit the UNF On The Record radio show's streaming site at www.unf.edu/publicrelations/media_relations/news/radio/2014/Style_identification_in_pop_and_rock_music.aspx

To learn more about Ching-Hua's work, visit her website at www.unf.edu/~c.chuan/Site/Home.html

11.30 - Katie is a CRA Outstanding Undergraduates Award Finalist

KatieAnna Wolf is selected as a Finalist in the Computing Research Association's Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award competition for 2011. Congratulations, Katie!

Katie was a DREU summer research fellow at MuCoaCo. She is the second MuCoaCo student to receive this honor; Anna Cheng-Zhi Huang was a Finalist in 2006.

According to the award letter, "This year's nominees were a very impressive group. A number of them were commended for making significant contributions to more than one research project, several were authors or coauthors on multiple papers, others had made presentations at major conferences, and some had produced software artifacts that were in widespread use. Many of our nominees had been involved in successful summer research or internship programs, many had been teaching assistants, tutors, or mentors, and a number had significant involvement in community volunteer efforts. It is quite an honor to be selected a Finalist from this group.

11.07 - Cambridge Brunch

Elaine Chew met with Anna Huang and Jonathan Bragg over brunch at Zoe's.  Anna has just passed her qualifying exams in Computer Science at Harvard, and Jonathan is now in his second year of oboe studies at the New England Conservatory.

10.07 - Anja Volk awarded Vidi grant

MuCoaCo alum, Anja Volk, is awarded a highly competitive Vidi grant by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).  See the press release.

The Vidi grant is "targeted at researchers who have completed their doctorates and already spent some years conducting post-doctoral research, thereby demonstrating the ability to generate new ideas and bring them independently to fruition. They will be given the opportunity to develop their own innovative lines of research and themselves to appoint one or more researchers to assist them in the task."

Anja was a WiSE postdoc in the MuCoaCo Lab at USC 2003 to 2005.  She joined the University of Utrecht's Department of Information and Computing Sciences in the Netherlands to co-lead the NWO-funded WITCHCRAFT project from 2006 to the present.

The Vidi grant will enable Anja to start her own research group to "model music similarity over time using the variation principle."  See the project description.  Congratulations, Anja!

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!

08.12 - Chinghua's Poster @ ISMIR in Utrecht

Ching-Hua Chuan presents a poster on "Quantifying the Benefits of Using an Interactive Decision Support Tool for Creating Musical Accompaniment in a Particular Style" (paper pdf) at the 11th ISMIR in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

08.09 - Anja Volk

Elaine Chew travels to the Netherlands for the ISMIR meeting this year, and meets up with Anja Volk and her family in Amsterdam, and spends a day at the North Sea, prior to the conference.

01.31 - MCM Reviewed in CMJ

Jonathan Bragg and Anna Huang's review the Mathematics and Computation in Music meeting appears in the Computer Music Journal 34(1): [ html ]