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.

04.05 - KatieAnna Wolf receives NSF Graduate Fellowship

KatieAnna Wolf, DREU fellow at the MuCoaCo Lab in summer 2010, has received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Katie will be commencing Computer Science PhD studies at Princeton in the Fall.

Katie was also a 2010 CRA Outstanding Undergraduates Award Finalist — see the Nov 30 blogpost.

03.07 - Jordan Smith's Master's thesis

The final version of lab member Jordan Smith's Master's thesis, completed at McGill University under Prof. Ichiro Fujinaga, has this past month been submitted and approved. It describes a MIREX-like evaluation (i.e., a benchmark evaluation) of music structure analysis algorithms. A direct download link is here: PDF.

Others working on music structure analysis may be interested in downloading the evaluation data, all of which are public and downloadable at Jordan's website. The thesis also introduces a modest new data set for structure analysis that consists entirely of public domain recordings, so anyone can download and share it.

Jordan continues to work on music structure-related research both at MuCoaCo (he and Isaac Schankler recently submitted an article to MCM on the structure of improvisations performed with Mimi) and back at McGill, through the SALAMI project which has created a large new database of structural analyses.

12.15 - Chandra Lunch

We have lunch at Morton Fig's, a new restaurant on campus, to celebrate Chandra Rajagopal's graduation with a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering.  Chandra has been active in helping out with the DIP and Mimi projects, and has developed his research on analysis of music performed on piano vs. guitar since the ISE 575 class last Spring.

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.

11.22 - 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.

11.06 - 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.

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.

07.23 - CCRMA Networked Music Performance Workshop

2010.07.19-23: Chandra Rajagopal attends the CCRMA Workshop on Networked Music Performance, where he explored new technologies in networked performance and experienced firsthand the challenges faced by musicians performing together over distance.

05.27 - Jonathan's Graduation

Jonathan Bragg graduates from Harvard University today with a degree in Computer Science. Anna Huang attend the graduation ceremony, and sends this picture from Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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 - Mimi evolving

Mimi continues to evolve as Isaac takes it through its paces in preparation for the June concert debut.

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.

02.24 - Isaac Schankler works with Mimi

Composer-improviser Isaac Schankler starts working with Mimi, in preparation for Mimi's concert debut at the People Inside Electronics concert this coming June. New changes, such as color coding of pitch classes are introduced.