I was delighted to be invited as a keynote speaker at the International Conference of the Society for Music Information Retrieval this year, organised by Ye Wang of the National University of Singapore and located at the NUS Research Institute in Suzhou, China.
ISMIR is the flagship conference of the music information retrieval/research community. My ability to carve out a career in music technology can be credited in no small part to the founding of this community the year I completed my PhD. Michael Fingerhut, organiser of ISMIR 2003 in Paris, recruited me to join ISMIR soon after we won an Information Technology Research NSF grant, only the second awarded for MIR. I subsequently served on the steering committee until the society was established and a new board created, and was program chair of ISMIR 2008 in Philadelphia. It has been some years since I have been at an ISMIR conference, usually my students attend; hence, it was an honor and real pleasure to return for a keynote (title, abstract reproduced below).
There was a strong showing at the conference by present and past members of the lab at ISMIR 2017. See the lab blogpost for links to the papers and photos of the poster presentations and reunion dinner.
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| Left-to-right: Roger Dannenberg, Meinard Müller, Xavier Serra, Elaine Chew, Masataka Goto, Geoffroy Peeters, Simon Dixon, George Tzanetakis, Ye Wang, (Jeffrey Smith not in picture) |
Suzhou is renowned for its gardens and lakes. Mid-week, Emilia Gomez, Anja Volk and I played hooky and took some time out to visit the Humble Administrator's Garden (拙政园), a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Thanks to Yang Jian, a colleague at the Shanghai Conservatory, I discovered the amazing Yuanlong Music Bookstore (元龙音乐书店) in Shanghai, and added a number of new scores to my collection of contemporary Chinese piano and cello-piano music. The shop entrance is tucked away innocuously at the back of a residential building; the inside—what an inside!—is a timeless maze of shelves lined with music books. This was how, in my one day in Shanghai, I happily whiled away what little time I had left in the city inside the bookstore.
ISMIR2017 Keynote
Structures: Performed, Perceived and Constructed
Prof. Elaine Chew, Professor of Digital Media at Queen Mary University of London’s School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science
Abstract: Conventional understanding of music structure in musicology as well as music information research limits its definition to musical form and sectional structures. But structure is more than sonata form or ABA structure. Structure refers to all manners of musical coherence as generated by surface features and deeper ones, musical entities and boundaries, movements and arrivals. Thus, long-term modulation of intensity or tension creates a form of structure (coherence), as does local weighting of notes to indicate an upbeat or downbeat, or subtle changes of color (for example, vibrato and timbral) amidst a sustained note. The human mind is wired to perceive, use, and crave structure. Grappling with ways to construct coherence is central to the work of music making, and imagining new and convincing ways to formulate musical coherence lies at the heart of musical innovation. By considering music structures as emerging from musical sense making, we open up new ways to explore and understand the manifold forms of music structure.
With this broad definition of music structure in mind, I shall survey some of our recent work* in the scientific and computational modeling and analysis of music structure as performed, music structure as perceived, and music structure as applied to composition. Structures as perceived or communicated through prosody serve to shape the meaning of the musical text; when perceived or communicated structures serve as the given information rather than the end goal in an algorithm, this dual (reverse) approach leads to interesting insights into musical sense making; when perceived or communicated structures further serve as sources for crafting new compositions, they provide important seed material for generating coherence. In addition, the musical mind imputes structure on music information. Harking back to the medieval concept of music internal to the human body (musica humana), the presentation will conclude with applications of music structure extracted from arrhythmic heartbeats.
Prof. Elaine Chew is Professor of Digital Media at Queen Mary University of London’s School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, where she is affiliated with the Centre for Digital Music. Her research centers on mathematical modeling of musical prosody, structure, cognition, and interaction. She was previously Associate Professor at the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering and Thornton School of Music, where she founded the Music Computation and Cognition research laboratory. Her work has received recognition through the NSF CAREER/PECASE awards, and fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She earned Ph.D. and S.M. degrees in Operations Research from MIT, and a B.A.S. in Mathematical and Computational Sciences (honors) and in Music Performance (distinction) from Stanford. She holds Fellowship and Licentiate diplomas in piano performance from Trinity College London. As a pianist, she has performed internationally as soloist and chamber musician, and she frequently collaborates with composers to commission, create, present, and record new music. Her work has been featured on Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Inside the Music series, and in an exhibit on Beautiful Science at the Huntington Library in California. She has served as a member of the MIT Music and Theater Arts Visiting Committee and the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Music External Review Committee. She is on the advisory/editorial boards of the Computer Music Journal, the Journal of Music and Mathematics, Music Theory Spectrum, and ACM Computers in Entertainment. This year, she is also a jury member of the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition and the Falling Walls Lab.
* The presentation includes joint work with Dorien Herremans, Isaac Schankler, Jordan Smith, Luwei Yang, Ashwin Krishna, Daniel Soberanes, and Matthew Ybarra.