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.

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.

11.06 - 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.

09.25 - 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.

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