QMUL, School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science
Centre for Digital Music Seminar Series
Seminar by:
Hauke Egermann (York Music Psychology Group @ University of York)
Date/time: Tuesday 6th of October, 3-4 pm
Location: Online
Open to students, staff, alumni, public; all welcome. Admission is FREE, no pre-booking required.
Title: Predicting Listener Experience in Functional Music Settings: Research at the Intersection between Music Psychology and Computer Science
Abstract: The talk will present my research on algorithmically predicting listener responses in the context of several research projects. This includes the ABC_DJ project which has developed an algorithmic music recommender system specifically for use in audio branding scenarios. The ABC_DJ team first developed a validated list of marketing-relevant attributes comprising 36 items. Two international listening experiments followed, with a total of n=10,144 participants rating the fit of over 500 excerpts of music to these terms. The same pieces were then analysed on an acoustic and musical level using state-of-the-art music information retrieval tools. Finally, machine learning was employed to map the correlations between acoustic features and ratings of semantic attributes. ABC_DJ furthermore addressed social variance in musical experience by incorporating a values-based segmentation indicator into the second listening experiment. The result is an algorithm capable of predicting perceived musical expression based on the acoustic features of music pieces on the one hand and the characteristics and values of listeners on the other. In a commercial context, the resulting ABC_DJ system will allow brands to search digital music libraries in real-time, automatically updating their track pools and playlists.
Video:
Bio: Hauke Egermann graduated in Systematic Musicology, Media Studies, and Communication Research (MA 2006, Hanover University for Music and Drama, Germany). Subsequently, he studied Neuroscience (PhD in Music Psychology/Neuroscience 2009, Center for Systems Neurosciences Hanover). He was Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (2009-2011, McGill University, Montreal, Canada). From 2011 to 2015 he lectured and researched at the Audio Communication Group (Technische Universität Berlin, Germany). In 2015 he was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Center for Digital Music, Queen Mary, University of London. In 2016 he was awarded his Habilitation in Musicology at the Technische Universität Berlin. Since 2016, he is member of the faculty at the Department of Music, University of York (UK). Here he is Associate Professor and directs the York Music Psychology Group which is part of the Music Science and Technology Research Cluster.