08.01 - Ching-Hua Chuan promoted to Associate Professor @ UNF

Ching-Hua Chuan, an alumnus of the Music Computation and Cognition Laboratory at the University of Southern California, has received tenure and been promoted to Associate Professor in the School of Computing at the University of North Florida. As in most institutions in the United States, academics on tenure track in computer science (and most engineering fields) are hired as assistant professors without tenure (in a probationary period), and are evaluated after five years for promotion to associate professor with tenure in the sixth year in a highly competitive process.  Congratulations, Ching-Hua!

Ching-Hua is received her PhD from the Department of Computer Science at USC, where she received a Digital Dissertation Award and was elected to Phi Kappa Phi honor society. Her research interests center on artificial intelligence and machine learning, and her projects range from style-specific music harmonization to sign language recognition. She is recipient of a Grace Hopper Celebration Best New Investigator Paper Award, and her work has been featured on Foxnews, MSNBC, the Telegraph, the Miami Herald, and the IEEE Intelligent Systems Magazine. A innovative educator, she is also recipient of UNF's Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award and has developed new courses on music informatics and on gaming and mobile app development.

Read more about Ching-Hua's work at www.unf.edu/~c.chuan.

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

04.26 - Digital Da Vinci Book Chapter on Mimi

Schankler, Isaac, Elaine Chew, and Alexandre R. J. Francois. (2014). Improvising with Digital Auto-scaffolding: How Mimi changes and enhances the creative process. In Newton Lee (ed.): Digital Da Vinci—Computers in Music, 99-125, Springer. ISBN 978-1-4939-0535-5. DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4939-0536-2_5.


Access Options

Individual chapter: SpringerLink Hardcover book: Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk

Abstract: This chapter poses, and proposes some answers to, questions about the origins and nature of creativity when digital media takes an active role in the music-making process. The discussions are centered on François’ Mimi (Multimodal Interaction for Musical Improvisation) system, which enables a musician to seed the computer with musical ideas and then improvise atop re-combinations of these ideas; the system provides the musician with visual foreknowledge of the machine’s intent and review of the interaction. They extend to the different instantiations of, and extensions to, the Mimi system, which are designed with various interaction nuances in mind, and engender new forms of creativity. We review each Mimi version, from the original blue-and-white silhouette display, to the Scriabin-inspired varicolored panels, to the multi-paneled user-directed Mimi4x. In each scenario, we consider the impact of Mimi on the creative process and the resulting performance; specifically, we describe the interaction between a performer, the composer (when this is different from the performer), and the system, analyzing the techniques used to successfully negotiate a performance with Mimi, and the formal musical structures that result from this interaction.


Supplemental material (video):

Analysis of performance with Schankler and Mimi.

04.02 - MuCoaCo alum Ching-Hua Chuan discusses style identification in pop/rock music

MuCoaCo alum Ching-Hua Chuan, now an Assistant Professor of Computing at the University of North Florida, discusses her research on a identifying style in pop/rock music through a multi-modal approach on “UNF On The Record,” a weekly radio show featuring campus life topics and faculty and student research.

To hear the interview, visit the UNF On The Record radio show's streaming site at www.unf.edu/publicrelations/media_relations/news/radio/2014/Style_identification_in_pop_and_rock_music.aspx

To learn more about Ching-Hua's work, visit her website at www.unf.edu/~c.chuan/Site/Home.html

03.15 - Isaac Schankler & co.'s Depression Quest is XYZZY Interactive Fiction Awards Best Implementation Finalist

Depression Quest, an award-winning interactive (non)fiction game about living with depression by Zoe Quinn, Patrick Lindsey, and Isaac Schankler, designed to spread awareness about depression, is a Best Implementation finalist for the 2013 XYZZY Awards, the equivalent of Academy or Grammy Awards recognizing extraordinary interactive fiction.

For Depression Quest, Isaac Schankler designed a generative and interactive soundtrack that depends on the player's path through the game. The music includes samples from freesound.org and is inspired by Arvo Pärt, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Alva Noto, David Kanaga.  Click on the square to download Isaac Schankler's soundtrack.

Isaac Schankler is an alum of both the QMUL Music Performance and Expression mini-group at the Centre for Digital Music (visiting artist-in-residence in 2012) and of the USC Music Computation and Cognition Lab (2010-2012), working on and improvising with both Mimi and Mimi4x.

10.03 - Isaac Schankler wins ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor Award

Isaac Schankler, visiting artist-in-residence 2011-2012, wins an ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor Award for his article “Sounds Heard: Anatomy of a Truth-Bender” on Adele and musical expression, published by New Music Box/New Music USA.

From the press release: 
The Awards were established in 1967 to honor the memory of composer, critic and commentator Deems Taylor, who died in 1966 after a distinguished career that included six years as President of ASCAP. The 45th ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor Awards are made possible by the generous support of ASCAP, The ASCAP Foundation and the Virgil Thomson Foundation. Virgil Thomson (1896-1989) was one of the great 20th century composers and music critics. Thomson served as a member of ASCAP's Board of Directors from 1975 to 1982.

The winners of the 45th annual ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor Awards ... will be honored at a special invitation-only ceremony and reception on Thursday, November 14th at ASCAP's New York offices.

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.