• ERC press release | 06-04-2018: ERC invests €650 million in ground-breaking research
• ERC ADG 2017 Outcomes: list of selected researchers
• ERC ADG 2017 Outcomes: indicative statistics
• ERC ADG 2017 Applications: facts and figures
I am thrilled that my proposal for a ERC ADG has been selected for funding. The proposal, COSMOS: Computational Shaping and Modeling of Musical Structures, uses data science/analytics and citizen science to understand music structures, particularly as they are experienced and made in performance, and also in unusual sources such as arrhythmic heartbeats.
Any effort on this scale could not have been successful without the help of many people, including family and friends and the numerous reviewers of the various versions of the proposal, and QMUL's EU pre-award officers, particularly Cate Cowton, who went over the reviews with a fine tooth comb and gave helpful suggestions for strengthening the bid.
Project Presentation (from the European Research Music Conference, 12 June 2018)
Project Summary
| Music performance is considered by many to be one of the most breath taking feats of human intelligence. That music performance is a creative act is no longer a disputed fact, but the very nature of this creative work remains illusive. Taking the view that the creative work of performance is the making and shaping of music structures, and that this creative thinking is a form of problem solving, COSMOS proposes an integrated programme of research to transform our understanding of the human experience of performed music, which is almost all music that we hear, and of the creativity of music performance, which addresses how music is made. The research themes are as follows: i) to find new ways to represent, explore, and talk about performance; ii) to harness volunteer thinking (citizen science) for music performance research by focussing on structures experienced and problem solving; iii) to create sandbox environments to experiment with making performed structures; iv) to create theoretical frameworks to discover the reasoning behind the structures perceived and made; and, v) to foster community engagement by training experts to provide feedback on structure solutions so as to increase public understanding of the creative work in music performance. Analysis of the perceived and designed structures will be based on a novel duality paradigm that turns conventional computational music structure analysis on its head to reverse engineer why a perceiver or a performer chooses a particular structure. Embedded in the approach is the use of computational thinking to optimise representations and theories to ensure accuracy, robustness, efficiency, and scalability. The PI is an established performer and a leading authority in music representation, music information research, and music perception and cognition. The project will have far reaching impact, reconfiguring expert and public views of music performance and time-varying music-like sequences such as cardiac arrhythmia. |
About the ERC Advanced Grants (adapted from the press release)
The ERC Advanced Grants are designed for well-established top researchers of any nationality or age with a recent high-level research track-record and profile that identifies them as leaders in their field(s). Awards are given to one researcher with her/her team, one host institution (based in the European Research Area), one project. The only selection criterion is scientific excellence. The host institution can be changed in the course of the project if the researcher so wishes. Projects are funded at up to €2.5 million per grant, and up to €3.5 million in exceptional cases such as major equipment purchase or mobility from another continent.
About the ERC (reproduced from the press release)
The European Research Council, set up by the European Union in 2007, is the first European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. Every year, it selects and funds the very best, creative researchers of any nationality and age, to run projects based in Europe. The ERC has three core grant schemes: Starting Grants, Consolidator Grants and Advanced Grants. An additional funding scheme, Synergy Grants, was re-introduced in 2017.
To date, the ERC has funded some 8,000 top researchers at various stages of their careers, and over 50,000 postdocs, PhD students and other staff working in their research teams. The ERC strives to attract top researchers from anywhere in the world to come to Europe. Key global research funding bodies, in the United States, China, Japan, Brazil and other countries, have concluded special agreements to provide their researchers with opportunities to temporarily join ERC grantees' teams.
The ERC is led by an independent governing body, the Scientific Council, chaired by the ERC President, Professor Jean-Pierre Bourguignon. The ERC has an annual budget of €1.8 billion for the year 2017. The overall ERC budget from 2014 to 2020 is more than €13 billion, as part of the Horizon 2020 programme, for which European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science Carlos Moedas is responsible.
Summary statistics
This year, 269 proposals were selected from 2167 for funding (≈12% success rate). I am one of 13 (one of 4 female) grantees under the Social Sciences and Humanities Panel SH5 (Cultures and Cultural Production). Of the countries that are host to the new Advanced Grants, the UK has the highest number (66); I am one of 8 non-European grantees in the UK. UK nationals also won the largest number of grants (50); US nationals received 14 ADG grants, and I am one of 4 women in this group (see below).
