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.

01.17 - UCSB and the Allosphere

Elaine Chew is invited to give an MAT (Media Arts and Technology) seminar on Building Bridges: Creating Sustainable Collaborations Amongst Musicians and Engineers [video] at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

She gets a tour of the Allosphere with JoAnn Kuchera-Morin; and catches up with Curtis Roads and Stephen Pope at dinner.

 

Her visit is organized by Șӧlen K. DiCicco.

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.

04.06 - Eran Egozy Visit (Pictures)

Eran Egozy met with students in the MuCoaCo Lab at 3pm.  Isaac Schankler gave a demonstration of Mimi, including a preview of Mimi making music with the BoeBots — the BoeBots are programmed by freshman Keith DeRuiter.

Informal Q&A with Eran took place at Tutor Cafe.

At the formal event, Eran performed two movements from Poulenc's Clarinet Sonata with Elaine Chew, and spoke about the founding of Harmonix Music Systems, its humble beginnings, the success of Guitar Hero, and the growth of the company.

04.06 - Eran Egozy Visit

A Conversation with Eran Egozy
CTO, Harmonix Music Systems
Wednesday, April 6, 2011, 7pm - 8pm
Parkside Performance Cafe

Eran Egozy, CTO of Harmonix Music Systems (creators of Guitar Hero and Rock Band) visits USC and the MuCoaCo Lab, and gives a presentation at the Parkside Performance Cafe that includes a performance of Poulenc's Clarinet Sonata (with Elaine Chew).

Click on event poster on the left for Eran's bio.

For more information about Eran and Harmonix, see the following posts:
PBS: NOVA: Eran Egozy: Game Developer
Here & Now: The Secret Life of Eran Egozy
NYTimes: While My Guitar Gently Beeps

03.23 - Mirman School STEM Keynote

Elaine Chew is the keynote speaker at the Women in STEM event at the Mirman School for Gifted Children, where she gives a talk on Music, Mathematics, and Computing.  Keyboard Concepts provided the Yamaha Disklavier used in the lecture-demonstration.

Pictured to the left are the USC women faculty who also gave presentations at the event.

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.

01.14 - Frequency Visualizer with Ondar at CalTech TEDx Event

Alexandre François created a program to perform real-time frequency visualization of vocal sounds by Ondar, the famed Tuvan throat singer.  As many as four to five major peaks are seen when Ondar does his throat singing.  The presentation was part of the fringe TEDx events in honor of Feynman at Caltech today, together with performances by Ondar's eclectic band.

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.

11.22 - ISE 495b KUSC Project

Tianqi Gao and Brad Kuntz, seniors in ISE, were given the KUSC project for the Senior Design class, ISE 495ab.  KUSC is currently the non-profit classical radio station with the largest listener base.  Their task was to find ways to integrated new media into KUSC's current programs to attract younger listeners, especially those in the 30-45 age range.  They were advised by Prof. Chew, and gave their presentation to the class this morning.

11.21 - Discover USC & Engineering Expo

MuCoaCo is part of the university-wide open house. Introductions to and demonstrations of Mimi and MuSA.RT by Isaac Schankler (DMA MUCO '10), Jordan Smith (PhD candidate, ISE), Tim Brochier (Junior, EE, minor in Music Industry), and Chandra Rajagopal (MS EE) take place on the half hour between 1pm and 4pm. Jordan turns out to be a natural at addressing the audiences, Isaac wowed the visitors with his Mimi improvisations, and Tim and Chandra manned the recording station.  In all, they represented a wide spectrum of experiences and backgrounds to show the multidisciplinary opportunities in music engineering research.  We had a surprise visitor, Chandra's dad, who is visiting from San Diego / Australia.

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.

09.24 - 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.

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.