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introduction

The research goal of the Music Computation and Cognition group is to systematically study and computationally model human abilities in music cognition. Basic research includes the automatic analysis of pitch and time structures. Application research includes music visualization, music information retrieval, expression synthesis and distributed performance.

Professors Chew and François are on leave at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study during the 2007-2008 academic year. You can visit their radcliffe research cluster website for the latest news.

recent highlights (full list is HERE)

Apr 15, 2008	Ching-Hua Chuan is elected to Phi Kappa Phi (ΦΚΦ), USC's oldest all-University honor society.
Mar 3, 2008	Jie Liu joins Cisco as a Software Engineer.
Mar, 2008	Arpi Mardirossian joins Buzznet.com as Media Design Manager, where she is working on the development of audio-based music recommendation systems and music visaulization based on the techniques developed in her dissertation.
Feb 8, 2008	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, 2008	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, 2008	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 ...
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).
Aug 28, 2007	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, 2007	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, 2007	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, 2007	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, 2007	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, 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."
Apr 2, 2007	Elaine Chew is awarded tenure and promoted to Associate Professor.
Mar 16, 2007	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, 2007	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, 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).
Feb 15, 2007	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 ]
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 ]
Nov 21, 2006	Eric Cheng successfully defends his Masters thesis on "Computational Modeling of Expression in Violin Performance". Present were Professors Chew, Kyriakakis, and Narayanan.
Sep 1, 2006	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.
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.
Apr 3-7, 2006	Gérard Assayag visits and gives a demo/lecture/workshop series in the Viterbi Early Career Chair Lecture Series (website). Read more about the Viterbi Early Career Chair Lecture Series (VECC0506)
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