... more lab photos  

introduction

The research goal of the Music Computation and Cognition group at USC is to systematically study, computationally model, and scientifically explain human abilities in music perception and cognition, and in music making, such as music performance, improvisation, and composition. Research projects at the laboratory address the three main areas of music analysis, performance, and composition/improvisation.

Professor Chew is on leave from USC 2007-2009. She and Professor François were fellows at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study 2007-2008, where they formed a research cluster on Analytical Listening through Interactive Visualization. Professor Chew is a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard University SEAS (Computer Science) and Music Department during the 2008-2009 academic year.

recent highlights (full list is HERE)

May 27, 2009	MuCoaCo is a prospective host for postdoctoral researchers funded through the Computer Innovation Fellows Project. See CIFellows project website and mentor information for further details.
May 23, 2009	MuCoaCo alum Ching-Hua Chuan is featured on the cover of Barry Magazine (see spotlight article), the magazine of the Miami Shores university where she now teaches.
May 7, 2009	MuCoaCo alum Rob Parke is selected as a Project MATCH intern for the Los Angeles community college district. The program prepares and recruits a diverse Community College faculty 'sensitive to the needs of the students it serves.'
Oct 10, 2008	MuCoaCo alum ChangHyun Kim commences PhD studies in the Bio and Brain Engineering Department at KAIST in South Korea.
Sep 19, 2008	At ISMIR 2008 in Philadelphia, Elaine Chew co-chairs the program committee, and gives a MuSA.RT demonstration and performance, and Ching-Hua Chuan presents a poster.
Sep 12, 2008	MuCoaCo alum Anna Huang commences Computer Science PhD studies in Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Aug 28, 2008	Alex François and Elaine Chew present a paper and ESP at ICMPC 10.
Sep 10, 2008	Congratulations Arpi Mardirossian on the birth of her daughter Sophie!
Jul 11, 2008	Ching-Hua Chuan presents a poster at the Music, Language & the Mind conference at Tufts.
May 13, 2008	Ching-Hua Chuan successfully defends her dissertation titled, "Hybrid Methods for Music Analysis and Synthesis: Audio Key Finding and Automatic Style-Specific Accompaniment." Committee members included Elaine Chew (chair), Alexandre François, Ramesh Govindan, C.-C. Jay Kuo, and Shri Narayanan.
May 13, 2008	Erdem Unal successfully defends his dissertation titled, "Music Retrieval Systems: Robust Search Under the Effect of Uncertainty." Committee members included Shri Narayanan (chair), Elaine Chew, C.-C. Jay Kuo, and Panayiotis Georgiou.
Apr 15, 2008	Ching-Hua Chuan is elected to Phi Kappa Phi (ΦΚΦ), USC's oldest all-University honor society.
Nov 5-7, 2007	Elaine Chew attends the Japan-America Frontiers of Engineering Symposium at HP Labs in Palo Alto, and receives the Best Poster Session Presenter award (two are given, one each to U.S. and Japan presenters).
May 19, 2007	MIMI's international debut took place in a lecture & demonstration titled "The Seiler Grand Piano and Computer-Interactive Improvisation with MIMI" by Alex François and Elaine Chew, at Berlin's Musical Instrument Museum, as part of the International Conference on Mathematics and Computation in Music (MCM2007).
May 18-20, 2007	Elaine Chew presents a three papers, (co-author Alex François) "Visible Humour : Seeing PDQ Bach's Musical Humour Devices in The Short-Tempered Clavier," (co-author Eric Cheng) "A Local Maximum Phrase Detection Method and the Analysis of Phrasing Strategies in Expressive," and "Pitch Symmetry and Invariants in Webern's 'Sehr Schnell'" at the International Conference on Mathematics and Computation in Music (MCM2007).
May 16, 2007	Jie Liu wins a USC Graduate School Dissertation Completion Fellowship.
Apr 6, 2007	Ching-Hua Chuan is one of three students awarded the 2007-2008 Digital Dissertation Fellowship for her project titled "Automatically Generated Style-Specific Musical Accompaniment."
Mar 16, 2007	Elaine Chew presents the Mathematics in Music concert and conversations, and an ESP demonstration with Alexandre François at the National University of Singapore Arts Festival. See: Campus Observer article and Arts Festival announcement.
Feb 17, 2007	MuCoaCo hosts the inaugural symposium of the Southern California Computing in Music network (SCCiM/2007i) at the University of Southern California, together with the University of California, San Diego. Elaine Chew and Shlomo Dubnov (UCSD) are organizers, assisted by PhD candidates Arpi Mardirossian and Jie Liu, and Arshia Cont (UCSD).
Jan 24, 2007	Elaine Chew produces and performs in an Arts and Humanities Initiative event, the Mathematics in Music, a lecture performance with a live demonstration of MuSA.RT, and the world premiere of composer Tamar Diesendruck's Sudoku Variations. [ event site, reh video clips, latimes article ]
Jun 14-16, 2006	Jie Liu presents paper titled "From Driving to Expressive Music Performance: Ensuring Tempo Smoothness" and Jie Liu and Alex François present the ESP demo at the first ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment (ACE2006). Paper acceptance rate was 12%, the ESP demo wins the Bronze Prize by popular vote.
Jun 9, 2006	Arpi Mardirossian is one of three USC students to win the 2006-2007 Digital Dissertation Fellowship, a fellowship "designed to foster multimedia research that expands the potential of academic publication via emergent and transitional media".
Jan 24, 2006	Anja Volk accepts postdoctoral position (starting May 2006) in the Witchcraft Project, an NWO-CATCH funded project at the University of Utrecht, where she will be deputy supervisor of the music information retrieval project.
Dec 2, 2005	Anna Huang is a finalist for the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Award: In the Viterbi News: Viterbi Engineer-Musician is Finalist for CRA 2006 Undergrad Honor

previous announcements with photos