Interested in becoming Assistant Professor in Generative AI in Amsterdam?

Generative AI in the past decade has changed the field of artistic creativity, making us ask new questions that are relevant not only for scientific research but also for musicians and artists of all kinds. With this position, we are seeking to broaden our profile with respect to AI-assisted music generation and how AI-generated art can be positioned within the humanities and cognitive science more generally. The explosive growth of creative AI has also brought new ethical and epistemological dimensions to reflect upon, and we are looking for a colleague who can translate this reflection into both teaching and research. The ideal candidate will be somebody comfortable engaging in the ethics and implications of using AI in artistic processes regardless of medium, with more specific expertise in how AI is (and can be) used to make music. 

See here for all information on how to apply.

Deadline for applications: 12 January 2023.

Join the 2017 real-time beat tracking competition?

Foot-tapping shoe competition at the 1994 ICMC in Aarhus, Denmark.

In 1994 we organized at the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) a foot-tapping competition on the computational modeling of beat perception.  Several researchers had their latest models control a mechanical shoe, while listening to a variety of national anthems. (See the Dutch Clog in action in the picture above, and below the original prototype.)

At an upcoming IEEE conference a similar challenge will be held. I'm quite exited about that. It is intriguing to see that a skill that is apparently so trivial for humans continues to be a challenge for machines (cf. Honing, 2013).

A prototype tapping in the P.C.Hoofthuis at the
University of Amsterdam in 1993.

The goal of the IEEE challenge is to implement a real-time beat tracker on an embedded platform and to demonstrate the performance with a creative output such as, but not limited to, drumming, dancing, or flickering lights. It is challenging to perform beat tracking in real time because the complete signal is not available. It is also challenging because there can be a wide variety of musical input and the system needs to perform well on all of them. For more information on why beat perception / beat tracking is interesting, see Dan Levitin's This is your brain on music, cited in the IEEE Cup Challenge document.

Important Dates: November 7, 2016 - Registration Deadline
March 5-9, 2017 - Final Competition at ICASSP 2017

Detailed information can be found here.

Honing, H. (2013) Musical Cognition. A Science of Listening. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers. ISBN 978-1-4128-4228-0.

SMART Cognitive Science: the Amsterdam Conference

The SMART Cognitive Science Conference will be hosted by the University of Amsterdam from March 25-28th, 2015. It will consist of 6 exciting workshops (each 2 full days, with 3 in parallel) on the cognitive science of music, language, communication and art, and a common evening program with debates and plenaries, and will be free to attend.

For more information and free registration see smartcs.humanities.uva.nl. 

N.B. There are also some interesting pre-conference events, such as an ABC lecture by Tecumseh Fitch (Vienna) on The Syntax of Mind: Dendrophilia and Human Cognition.

Hooked on music: What makes music catchy?

Presentation of hooked-game at the Science Museum in August 2014.

Everyone knows a hook when they hear one, but scientists don’t know why. By playing the Hooked on Music game you are exploring the science of songs and helping us to unlock what makes music catchy.

#HookedonMusic is a citizen science experiment involving the Manchester Science festival, produced by the Museum of Science & Industry in association with the University of Amsterdam. In devising an online game for all to enjoy, we try to harness the wisdom of the crowd to understand and quantify the effect of catchiness on musical memory. Explore the game here.

Presentation of hooked-game at the Science Museum in August 2014.

For more information on #HookedonMusic see the About on www.hookedonmusic.org.uk.
For more online experiments see MCG website.

J.A. Burgoyne, D. Bountouridis, J. van Balen, & H. Honing (2013). Hooked: A Game for Discovering What Makes Music Catchy. Proceedings of the 14th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, 245-250. Curitiba, Brazil.

Interested in a PhD fellowship in Amsterdam?

The Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) currently has a PhD fellowship available at the Faculty of Humanities starting on 1 September 2013. Applications are now invited from excellent candidates wishing to conduct research in an area in which either the Logic and Language group or the Language and Computation group at ILLC are active, such as the computational modeling of human information processing, especially natural language and music (LaCo) and/or foundational issues in mathematics and computer science (LoCo). For more information, see here. Deadline for applications is 14 January 2013.

Can artificial music evolve in a Darwinian way?

Natural selection expresses the idea that organisms (i.e. their genes) vary and that variability has consequences. Some variants are unfit and go extinct, others adapt and do well. This process, repeated over millions of years, has given us the variety of life on earth.

Many authors have played with the idea how to combine these insights from evolutionary biology to changes in culture, the notion of ‘memes’ being one of them. Richard Dawkins proposed that human culture is composed of a multitude of particulate units, memes, which are analogous to the genes of biological transmission. These cultural replicators are transmitted by imitation between members of a community and are subject to mutational-evolutionary pressures over time.

This week an interesting study appeared in PNAS (early edition) showing that a simple Darwinian process can produce music. Inspired by cultural transmission theory, the study suggests that the evolution of music can be viewed and analyzed in terms of selection-variation processes, and, as such, may shed light on the evolution of real musical cultures.

The experiment described in the paper works as follows: An algorithm maintains a population of tree-like digital genomes, each of which encodes a computer program. Each genome-program specifies note placement, instrumentation, and performance parameters (with tempo, meter, and tuning system fixed for all loops). Loops periodically replicate to produce new loops. The selective pressure on the music that is generated comes from a population of consumers who listen to samples of the loops via a Web interface (DarwinTunes) and rate them for their appeal. These ratings are then the basis of a fitness function that determines which loops in a given generation will be allowed to mate and reproduce.



Robert M. MacCallum, Matthias Mauch, Austin Burta, & Armand M. Leroi (2012). Evolution of music by public choice. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1203182109

(See also earlier blog entry).