2008
Feb 8	Ching-Hua Chuan attends and presents her automated style-specific accompaniment system at the Graduate Student Workshop on The Tonal Systems of Rock at the University of Michigan, part of the Conversations 2008: Music Scholarship in Dialogue conference.
Feb 8	Elaine Chew and Alexandre François give a McGill University Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT) Musical Information Archiving and Retrieval (Axis 3) Workshop (workshop website). Elaine speaks on Music Science and the Mathematical Modeling of Tonality, and Alex on A Design Language for Interactive Systems.
Jan 25	MuCoaCo folks, Ching-Hua Chuan, Anna Huang (alum), Alex François, and Elaine Chew attend and present at the inaugural meeting of the New England Music Information Special Interest Group (NEMISIG). Elaine gave an introduction to MuCoaCo (slides); Ching-Hua and Anna presented posters. Photos ...
2007
Nov 5-7	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).
Oct 19	Elaine Chew speaks on "Music and Operations Research - the Perfect Match" at the UMass Amherst OR/MS Seminar Series. The abstract can be found here. For photos, click on the camera ...
Aug 28	Jie Liu succesfully defends his dissertation titled, "User-Centered Design and Computing in ESP: a Driving Interface for Musical Expression Synthesis." Committee members included Elaine Chew (chair), Alexandre François (co-advisor), Maged Dessouky, and Ulrich Neumann.
Aug 6	Erdem Unal succesfully passes his Qualifying Exam. His thesis proposal is titled, "Music Retrieval Systems: Robust Performance Under the Effect of Uncertainty." Committee members included Shri Narayanan (chair), Elaine Chew, Panayiotis Georgiou, Keith Jenkins, and Cyrus Shahabi."
Jun 18-19	Ching-Hua Chuan presents a paper titled "A Hybrid System for Automatic Generation of Style-Specific Accompaniment," and Alex François and Elaine Chew present "MIMI - multi-modal interaction for musical improvisation" at the 4th International Joint Workshop on Computational Creativity at Goldsmiths (CC07), University of London."
Jun 5	Arpi Mardirossian successfully defends her PhD dissertation, titled "Investigations in Music Similarity: Analysis, Organization, and Visualization using Tonal Features." Committee members included Elaine Chew (chair), Shri Narayanan, and Sheldon Ross.
May 29	Ching-Hua Chuan successfully presents her proposal for her PhD dissertation at her qualifying examination, titled "Hybrid Methods for Music Analysis and Synthesis: Audio Key Finding, Phrase Segmntation, Automatic Accompaniment.""
May 19	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	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	Jie Liu wins a USC Graduate School Dissertation Completion Fellowship.
Apr 18	Jie Liu speaks on "Human-Centered Computing and Design in ESP:a driving interface for musical expression synthesis" at the ISE PhD seminar. The talk covers the implementation of ESP system, ensuring tempo smoothness, performance similarity based on different interpretations, and road design based on modeling a driver's behavior.
Apr 6	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." The project aims to create a computer-assisted music-making system that takes a user's original melody (input by humming), and automatically creates (by a combination of statistical and knowledge-based methods) sophisticated accompaniment for the melody, in the style of the user's favorite piece or music band.
Apr 2	Elaine Chew is awarded tenure and promoted to Associate Professor.
Mar 16	Elaine Chew present the Mathematics in Music concert and conversations at the National University of Singapore Arts Festival. See: Campus Observer article and Arts Festival announcement.
Feb 23-28	Elaine Chew gives series of lectures -- a public lecture on "Music, Mathematics and Computing - beyond tuning, fractions, and sound synthesis," a computer science lecture on "Heuristics and Algorithms for Music Problems," and "the Mathematics in Music" lecture-concert -- as part of the Women Scholars Lecture Series at the University of Victoria in Victoria, B.C., Canada, hosted by George Tzanetakis.
Feb 17	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).
Feb 15	Jeanne Bamberger visits and gives guest lecture on "Tracing the compositional process - a natural experiment," 6:30pm - 9:10pm, at KAP 156, in the ISE 575 class [ course website ]
Feb 7	Arpi Mardirossian speaks on "Modeling Music's Look, Feel, and Behavior" at the ISE PhD seminar.
Feb 5	Arpi Mardirossian gives practice talk titled "Modeling Music's Look, Feel, and Behavior" at 3pm in PHE 104 for a job interview at Occidental College.
Jan 24	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 ]
Jan 23	MuCoaCo participates in the IMSC Open House, held in onjunction with the LA County Tech Week.
Jan 6	Ching-Hua Chuan and Elaine Chew attend and present at the Special Sessions on Mathematical Techniques in Musical Analysis, part of the Joint Mathematics Meeting in New Orleans, the 113th Annual Meeting of the American Mathematical Society. Session details can be found here. For photos, click on the camera ...
2006
Nov 21	Eric Cheng successfully defends his Masters thesis on "Computational Modeling of Expression in Violin Performance". Present were Professors Chew, Kyriakakis, and Narayanan.
Nov 17	2:00PM, PHE 104. Eric Cheng gives practice thesis defense presentation.
Oct 3	3:30M, PHE 104. Arpi Mardirossian gives practice presentation for her ISMIR 2006 paper.
Sep 1	Merrick Mosst successfully defends his Masters thesis on "Quantitative Modeling of Emotion Perception in Music". Present were Professors Chew, Kyriakakis, and Ortega. Merrick's presentation was commended by Prof. Ortega, Associate Chair of EE-Systems, for being the best Masters thesis presentation he has seen.
Aug 31	4:00PM, PHE 104. Merrick Mosst gives practice thesis defense presentation.
Aug 21	Arpi Mardirossian, successfully defends her thesis proposal in the qualifying examination. Present were Professors Chew, Narayanan, Palmer, Ross, and Yang.
Jun 14-16	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	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".
Jun 6	California StreamIN remote performance experiment takes place between IMSC and Stanford CCRMA's Soundwire Group. ChangHyun Kim (CCRMA), Rob Parke, Leila Vaziri, Sakire Arslan, and Qin Min (IMSC) lead the setup. Kim and Vaziri learn, practice, and perform Mozart's "Larghetto und Allegro" over the Internet (two-way low-latency audio streaming). The DIP faculty team consists of Chew, Zimmermann, Sawchuk, Papadopoulos, and Kyriakakis. CCRMA and the Soundwire Group are headed by Chris Chafe. See the California StreamIN site.
May 10	ISE 599 (aka ISE 575b) class on Computational Modeling of Expressive Performance and final projects highlighted in the Viterbi news: Engineering Class Creates Tools to Analyze Musical Expression [ projects, press, photos ]
May 4	Jie Liu, successfully defends his thesis proposal in the qualifying examination. Present were Professors Chew, Dessouky, François, Liu, and Yang.
May	Merrick Mosst is awarded the Rose Hills Merit Scholarship, a competitive merit-based scholarship program for Southern Californian citizens in an undergraduate or "4+1" program in the Life or Natural Sciences or Engineering.
May 1	Anna Huang wins the 2006 Outstanding Research Award In Computer Science at USC "in recognition of her excellence in research and outstanding contributions to the department and to the university" (awards ceremony).
Apr 3-7	Gérard Assayag visits and gives a demo/lecture/workshop series in the Viterbi Early Career Chair Lecture Series (website).
Mar 3	Curtis Roads visits and speaks on "Synthesis, analysis, and visualization of sound based on Gabor's atomic model" in the Viterbi Early Career Chair Lecture Series (VECC0506).
Feb 15-16	Jeanne Bamberger visits and speaks on "Expressing the Difference: Comparing Great Performances" in the Viterbi Early Career Chair Lecture Series (VECC0506) and on "Situated Inquiry: Moving between action and representation" in the MUED 520 class.
Feb 10	Chris Chafe visits and speaks on "Tapping into the Internet as an Acoustical Medium" in the Viterbi Early Career Chair Lecture Series (VECC0506).
Feb 3	MuCoaCo hosts the WVT Rusch Engineering Honors Colloquium (1PM-2PM): about the Rusch Engineering Honors Program
Jan 24	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.
2005
Dec 12, 2005	11:30AM, PHE 104. Aaron Yang gives trial run of MIPR paper presentation.
Dec 2	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
Oct 10, 2005	4PM, PHE 104. Ching-Hua Chuan's and Arpi Mardirossian's report on ISMIR 2005: Part II.
Oct 6-8	USC 125th Anniversary Celebrations - Festival 125 (Festival Pavilion) Expression Synthesis Project (ESP) Demo -- 9AM-7PM Oct 6-7, 9AM-12:30PM Oct 8
Oct 6-7	IMSC Open House @ MuCaoCo Lab for Festival 125, Viterbi School of Engineering's 100th Anniversary and Trojan Parents Weekend (2PM-5PM Oct 6, 10AM-6PM Oct 7)
Oct 3, 2005	4PM, PHE 104. Ching-Hua Chuan's and Arpi Mardirossian's report on ISMIR 2005: Part I.
Sep 10-15	The 6th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval, ISMIR 2005, will be held at Queen Mary, University of London (ISMIR 2005), with tutorials at Goldsmith's College. Elaine Chew is gave an invited tutorial on Music Background with Dalia Atlas; Ching-Hua Chuan presented a full paper; and, Arpi Mardirossian, Chew and Chuan are organizers of the key-finding competition.
Sep 5, 2005	3PM, PHE 104. Ching-Hua Chuan gives trial run of ISMIR presentation. Erdem Unal gives update on NSF-ITR query-by-humming project.
Aug 29, 2005	1PM, PHE 104. Ching-Hua Chuan reports on music and audio processing papers at ICME 2005, Amsterdam. Liu Jie and Arpi Mardirossian report on the IIE Doctoral Colloquium.
July 6-8	Ching-Hua Chuan attends and presents a paper on audio key finding at the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME 2005) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
July 4-5	Elaine Chew attends and presents a paper on the distributed immersive performance project at the 5th open workshop of MusicNetwork in Vienna, Austria.
July 2-6	Anja Volk attends and presents a paper the 10th rhythm Perception and Production Workshop (RPPW2005) in Bilzen, Belgium
June 20	Music theorist Alfred Cramer visits MuCoaCo with You Young Kang and a student.
June 18-25	Anna Huang's composition, "Breathe", wins first prize in the San Francisco Choral Artists' New Voices Project -- A Program for Young Composers. The piece premieres in Oakland, Palo Alto and San Francisco.
June 13-15	The Integrated Media Systems Center hosts its annual Scientific Advisory Board / Board of Councillors and National Science Foundation site visit. Ching-Hua Chuan, Anna Huang, Jie Liu and Carley Tanoue present demos and posters, Arpi Mardirossian and Aaron Yang present posters.
June 13-14	Elaine Chew wins a Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (PECASE). See photos from the white house and national science foundation ceremonies.
June 3-4	Arpi Mardirossian attends the M2K North American workshop at U. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
May	Carley Tanoue's review of the Fourth MUSICNETWORK Open Workshop is on the Computer Music Journal online.
May 30	USC Viterbi School of Engineering news article on ESP: Baby, You Can Drive My Song. The Expression Synthesis Project (ESP) team consists of Elaine Chew, Alex François, Jie Liu and Aaron Yang.
May 14	Arpi Mardirossian and Jie Liu, ISE PhD candidates, were selected to participate in, and present posters at, the IIE doctoral colloquium.
May 7	ISE575/CSCI575/EE675 completes its first cross-listed offering.
Apr 22	Anna Huang wins a Josephine de Karman Fellowship. Only ten such awards are given each year nationwide.
Apr 7	Carley Tanoue and Eric Wiggins won the best presentation award at the 9th IMSC Student conference for their presentation on the Distributed Immersive Performance project.
Jan 16	Arpi Mardirossian, Ching-Hua Chuan and Elaine Chew propose the key-finding competition (audio and symbolic) and evluation strategies for the 2nd Annual Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange (MIREX), part of ISMIR 2005.

updated February 13, 2008.