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.

10.08-12 - MuCoaCo Alumni @ ISMIR

Three MuCoaCo alumni - Ching-Hua Chuan, Erdem Unal, and ChangHyun (Daniel) Kim - and two current PhD students - Jordan Smith and Katerina Kosta - attended ISMIR in Porto, Portugal, this year.  The posters presented were as follows:

Chuan, C. & Chew, E. (2012). Creating Ground Truth for Audio Key Finding: When the Title Key May Not Be the Key. [ pdf ]

Kosta, K., Marchini, M. & Purwins, H. (2012). Unsupervised Chord-Sequence Generation from an Audio Example [ pdf ]

Unal, E., Bozkurt, B. & Karaosmanoğlu, M. (2012). N-gram Based Statistical Makam Detection on Makam Music in Turkey Using Symbolic Data [ pdf ]

Ching-Hua Chuan is founder of the WiMIR (Women in Music Information Retrieval) special interest group that met a second time in a row at ISMIR.

Daniel Kim, currently a PhD candidate at KAIST, participated in the audio onset detection MIREX competition.

01.10 - IPAM Largescale Multimedia Search Workshop

Elaine Chew is an invited speaker at a Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) Largescale Multimedia Search Workshop that takes place January 9-13 at the University of California, Los Angeles. She represents the Music Information Retrieval community with Juan Bello, Laurent Daudet, and Malcolm Slaney, and gives a talk on Music Structure and Prosody.

06.17 - Intl Conf on Mathematics & Computation in Music @ Ircam

Members of MuCoaCo attended the MCM (Mathematics and Computation in Music) meeting held at Ircam (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) this week.

MuCoaCo alum, Anja Volk, and Aline Honingh co-hosted a panel on "Bridging the Gap: Computational and Mathematical Approaches in Music Research."

On the first evening was a dialog with Pierre Boulez and Alain Connes coordinated by Gérard Assayag at Ircam's Espace de Projection.

We had a group picture with Gérard in the Ircam corridor. From left to right: Isaac Schankler, Anna Huang, Gérard Assayag, Anja Volk, Elaine Chew, Jordan Smith, Aline Honingh.

Isaac and Jordan presented a paper on "Emergent Formal Structures of Factor Oracle-Driven Musical Improvisations" and Isaac gave a demonstration of Mimi on the final day of the conference.  The paper is described in this earlier post.

01.23-28 - Dagstuhl Seminar on Multimodal Music Processing

Elaine Chew and Alexandre François participate in a Dagstuhl Seminar on Multimodal Music Processing organized by Simon Dixon, Masataka Goto, and Meinard Mueller. The participants give introductory presentations, and broke out in special topics discussion sessions.  Cynthia Liem (University of Delft) and Elaine Chew perform Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 (transcribed for piano four hands by Scharwenka) at the concert on the final evening.

More photos by Jeremy Pickens can be found here.

01.06 - AMS Math Music Special Sessions

Elaine Chew attends and presents a paper on The Pentahelix: a Four-Dimensional Realization of the Spiral Array at the Special Sessions on Mathematical Techniques in Musical Analysis organized by Robert Peck and Thomas Fiore at the AMS Joint Mathematics Meeting in New Orleans.

Photos below show the Mississippi shoreline, and pictures to the left are of the dinner after the two sessions.

11.05/06 - Prosody and Dialog in Language and Music

Elaine Chew and Alexandre François co-organize an Exploratory Seminar on Prosody and Dialog in Language and Music at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.  The seminar brings together scientists, humanists, and artists to examine prosody and dialog in language and music from multiple ideological, scholarly, and technical perspectives with the goal of creating new avenues for scholarly exploration

During the two-day seminar, the participants were treated to a beautiful performance of Persian music on the tar by Bahman Panahi, artist-in-residence at the Harvard Music Department, thanks to Richard Wolf.

Following the introductory presentations of the first day were stimulating discussions at lunch and in the conference room on the connections between music and speech, and future directions for exploration.

11.06 - Jordan @ SMT

Jordan Smith and Chandra Rajagopal stand in front of Jordan's SMT poster on the brick wall at the MuCoaCo Lab

Jordan travels to Indianapolis for the Society of Music Theory meeting and presents a poster on A Comparison and Evaluation of Approaches to the Automatic Formal Analysis of Musical Audio, work based on his Masters thesis with Ichiro Fujinaga at McGill University.

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.

08.13 - Katie's Poster @ ISMIR in Utrecht

KatieAnna Wolf presents a poster on "Evaluation of Performance-to-Score MIDI Alignment of Piano Duets" (abstract pdf) in the late breaking / demo session at the 11th ISMIR in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Katie was a 2010 CRA-W DREU (distributed research experiences for undergraduates) awardee—one of 70 selected from over 500 applicants—and a senior double majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Minnesota. She was at the MuCoaCo Lab over the summer to work on analyzing data from the DIP (distributed immersive performance) project.

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.

07.23 - Mimi4x @ IMIDA Workshop

Mimi4x, an interactive installation for high level structural improvisation based on Mimi, is unveiled at IMIDA 2010, an IEEE Conference on Multimedia & Expo workshop.  Alex François and Elaine Chew present the paper:

Francois, A. R. J., I. Schankler, E. Chew (2010). Mimi4x: An Interactive Audio-Visual Installation for High-Level Structural Improvisation. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME 2010), Singapore, July, 2010.

and demonstrate Mimi4x in Singapore.  The Mimi4x system is also shown in the video below with four sets of music material composed by Isaac Schankler collectively titled Airport:

The paper will be extended and included in a special issue of the International Journal of Arts and Technology.

03.06 - MuSA.RT @ MTSE

Elaine Chew gives a keynote lecture, Tonality Algorithms and Visualization, at the Music Theory Southeast meeting, held at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina, this  year.

A large contingent of faculty and students are at the MTSE meeting from Florida State University at Tallahassee, including Clifton Callender and Joseph Kraus pictured below. Adrian Childs of the University of Georgia, a recent collaborator on the organization of MCM 2009 at Yale,  is also pictured below. It was gratifying to see the enthusiasm of the attendees for MuSA.RT, several of whom started cheering for certain tonal centers to win out over others.