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

03.31 - Musical Patois — reflections of language in music

Visions and Voices: the USC Arts and Humanities Initiative

Thursday, March 31, 2011 : 7:30pm University Park Campus Alfred Newman Recital Hall (AHF) Admission is free.

Musical Patois is the result of a unique collaboration among a neuroscientist, a composer, a performer/engineer and a computer scientist. This event will boldly explore and transgress the boundaries between science, music, technology and art. The event is inspired by the research of neuroscientists Aniruddh Patel and John Iversen and composer Jason Rosenberg, which demonstrated that the instrumental music of British and French composers reflects the rhythm and intonation of their native languages. Patel, along with composer Peter Child, pianist-engineer Elaine Chew and computer scientist Alexandre François, will examine the influence of language on music through an evening of scientific presentation, musical performance, interactive visualization and lively conversation.

Organized by Elaine Chew (Engineering) and Alexandre François (Engineering).

More information at the Visions and Voices website.

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.

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 - 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.

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.

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.

06.05 - Vicious Circles and Deadly Elements

Mimi 1.5 makes her concert debut at the People Inside Electronics concert at the Boston Court Performing Arts Center, Pasadena. See/hear the concert preview with Isaac Schankler at the Yamaha Disklavier. [ press release, poster ]

05.11 - ISE 575 Final Projects

Final project presentations for EE 675 / ISE 575, Topics in Engineering Approaches to Music Cognition, take place today.  The topic this year is Musical Prosody and Interpretation.  Here is a link to the list of projects and the photos.

03.08 - DREU awardees @ MuCoaCo

Jiayun Guo of the University of Washington and Katie Wolf of the University of Minnesota are among 70 out of 500 students selected for this summer's CDC/CRA-W Distributed Research Experiences for Undergraduates (DREU). They will be working at the MuCoaCo Lab this summer.

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.

03.04 - Zenph Studios

Elaine Chew visits Zenph Studios while in the Carolinas for the Music Theory Southeast meeting. John Walker gives a tour of their facilities in Raleigh, NC. MuSA.RT analyzes tonal structures as projected by Glenn Gould's 1955 performance of Bach's Goldberg Variations and Art Tatum's 1933 recording of Tea for Two (shown below). Anatoly Larkin plays with MuSA.RT and tests its analytical limits. We also let Mimi have a go at the Art Tatum.

Glenn Gould's 1955 performance of Goldberg Variation 8

Art Tatum's 1933 performance of Tea for Two

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 ]

01.28 - Aniruddh Patel

Aniruddh Patel of the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego visits USC and gives a talk on "Rhythm in Speech and Music." The talk took place at Doheny Library, and was attended by over 200 people across three schools at USC — the Viterbi School of Engineering, the Thornton School of Music, and the College of Letters, Arts & Sciences — and beyond.

06.22 - MCM @ Yale University

2009.06.19-22: Elaine Chew is program co-chair, with Adrian Childs, of the Second Biennial International Conference on Mathematics and Computation in Music, held at Yale University. Ching-Hua Chuan is Publications Chair. Together, Chew, Childs, and Chuan co-edited the refereed conference proceedings, which is published as Volume 38 of the Springer Communications in Computer and Information Science series.

09.18 - ISMIR @ Drexel University

2008.09.14-18: Elaine Chew is program co-chair, with Juan Pablo Bello, of the Ninth International Conference on Music Information Retrieval, held at Drexel University. Together with Douglas Turnbull, they co-edited the refereed conference proceedings, which is published by lulu.com. At the conference, Elaine Chew gives a MuSA.RT demonstration and performance, and Ching-Hua Chuan presents a poster.