It’s taken me a little while to write this blog post. To be honest, this has been for a mixture of reasons, firstly it has taken me a little time to reflect and consider exactly how I want to summarise the placement I have just had, and secondly I am not sure I was ready to write an ‘it is over’ blog post.
From October 21st till December 14th I swapped countries and took on the position of visiting researcher at the University of Utrecht. When I first accepted this opportunity, given to me through my WiMIR mentor Anja Volk, I was nervous, excited, and also (honestly) I did not really have an idea as to what to expect. I was nervous because I had never been away from home for that long, I had never lived on my own, and I also can speak very little dutch…
Today is my last day at @UniUtrecht. 2 months has gone so fast. Thank you to the wonderful @Women_MIR programme for pairing me with Anja Volk, who gave me this opportunity collaborate abroad pic.twitter.com/jtr8y5pRsV
Excited. I was excited because I have found in the last year with all the strikes in academia and the fact that I work from home. I was excited about a change. I was looking forward to being in a more positive academic environment, seeing how a different University worked, how even academia in a different country worked. I was also excited to experience working in an office, not from home, and how that might feel and how my chronic illness would cope with that.
Not knowing what to expect. Well, the one thing I can say with absolute confidence is that this is one of the best things I have done during my PhD. I have had an incredible time. I have collaboratively written a journal article, which I hope to submit to a journal in the new year. I have worked with Chordify and the University, experiencing both Industry and Academia. And I have majorly fallen in love with my field and discipline (more than I already did, which I did not know was possible). I loved working in a team. The collaborative environment and the cultural atmosphere in academia in the Netherlands is incredible. The lab was so friendly, really integrated me within their group, and I felt that we gave each other a renewed energy and love for our field.
For me the most important thing is what am I going to take away from this trip, I have made a little list of things I have learnt, and things I want to integrate into my future as an academic:
Love your research. If you really love what you are researching, it doesn’t feel like work — and others can tell.
Work collaboratively. Working collaboratively not only is socially great, but it also enables you to develop ideas, and gain new perspectives.
Each lunch with your colleagues. My favourite thing in the Netherlands was the fact that both in business and in the University everyone in the research group, and extended to other research groups in the corridor went to lunch together. This was a fantastic time to relax and take a break from work. But also, some fascinating collaborations came out of lunch. It gives you a chance to explain your work to a wider audience.
PhD students and academics (of all levels) can be in a collaborative, equal, working team. The bi-weekly meeting for our research group, not only saw the PhD Students update the academics on what we had been up to, but also the reverse. I felt this meant you felt more like a staff member and enabled us to gain an insight into the future of our careers.
This blog post was delayed (sorry) as part of this week I was away – back in the UK. As well as my work in Utrecht, I have also taught my first lesson at Middlesex University, attended the University of Southampton Music Analysis Post Graduate Seminar, and enjoyed some time with my family.
Just finished my first class at @MdxUniMusic, a lecture on the film music of Hitchcock and Herrmann as a way to begin to aurally analyse music 🎼🎶🎻🎹
In Utrecht, my work has been mostly focused on continuing working with Chordify, and on a developing journal article with other researchers at the university. I have also developed the structure of my thesis, and I feel that I am starting to get a list of goals for its completion (though I still have two more studies, and another data-set to analyse!). My work is going well, this next week coming (week 5) I will be giving my lecture at the University of Utrecht, and tomorrow I have another meeting at Chordify (to discuss applying my work to another set of data and future collaborations). I am also hoping that the majority of the analysis on the dataset we are working with will be completed, and the article will be under-way.
Continuing my weekly blog, here is my second post in my series on my research placement in Utrecht (see blog post one here). I am now in the swing of it, I have my routine down, I am always getting on the right bus (the first week I was here I took the wrong bus back from campus and it took me a long, long way out of Utrecht). I’ve tried a lot of new fun food, including hot dogs:
Importantly though, my collaborative work with Chordify and Utrecht University is going really well. We have nearly completed a thorough analysis of our dataset. And I am back again tomorrow to discuss with Chordify what these results mean, and how we can use these theories I am developing in practice. It’s nice to be working in such a collaborative team, I have often found in the humanities the idea of the single researcher working in their own silos is dominant (I even wrote a paper on this a year ago, where I challenged this with the concept of ‘Big Musicology‘). The work I am currently doing has also opened up, and begun to show the possibilities for music theory research in the “real world”, or a world outside of academia. When I began my PhD I was interested in applying music theoretical approaches outside of just the domain of academia, and my work with Choridfy is just one way that my PhD is highlighting music theories potential.
So what is next for me out here? Firstly, I need to finish the final analyses of this dataset and write our collaborative paper so others can see the work we have been doing. I am visiting family and friends later next week so work will be slowed down a little, I am also meeting with my supervisors back at Southampton and engaging with the music analysis community in the UK – and lecturing at Middlesex University. Once back here the week after I will also be lecturing at the University of Utrecht.
I have just finished my first week at the University of Utrecht as a visiting researcher. I decided that during my time away I would try to write blog posts to discuss what I have learnt, be it through furthering my PhD, the work I am collaborating on, or just reflections on the differences in academic environments. It feels like this trip has been a long time in preparation, probably because It was first spoken about at my last trip to the Netherlands back in January. It was therefore nice to come to an environment where I already knew some people I would be collaborating on, and I, therefore, had a few ideas about what the projects I would be working on would entail.
This first week has been mostly about getting myself into a routine. Unlike my home institution, all PhD Students and staff work from the office at least 3 days a week, the offices are grouped in research groups – so I am in the Music Similarity Lab. I find that this stimulates collaboration from the very beginning, there are people working specifically on similar research projects to you not only within your own office but in the offices either side of you. One of my favourite things about the environment here is that everyone goes to lunch together every day. Not only is this a lovely social activity, but I feel it really brings the group together as a whole. I have met lecturers, professors, heads of research groups, heads of faculty all through lunch. I think this is something we could all learn from in our institutions as it provides a really enjoyable working environment, where you feel equal and respected by all.
This week I have begun working on two projects and discussed some guest lectures. In my thesis, I have been working with Chordify’s annotator subjectivity dataset, with other researchers in the department. This work looks like it will develop into a paper, and I have many meetings in the coming week to discuss how we further work on this together. I am also working on using the results from my first study (musicsimilaritiy.soton.ac.uk) with the departments work on pattern detection – to see how my participants’ perception of similarity may or may not align with current pattern detection algorithms.
Along with all this, I have had a great time just exploring the city I get to live in for the next two months! I’ve climbed the Dom tower, explored a Robots love music exhibition and seen many canals. I’ve also got an OV-Chipkaart and learnt how to claim back money when you forget to check-in or out at a station… I am definitely starting to feel like a local.
Earlier this month I attend CityMAC at City University London, followed by the SMA summer school at Leeds University. Both events were fruitful, inspiring and engaging. Allowing a chance for both talks on collaboration, networking and furthering my knowledge of the field.
What a fab week of @SocMusAnalysis events! 1st #CityMAC where I spoke on the new directions of my work, & 2nd a very stimulating & engaging Summer School. Great to catch up with old colleagues & meet new ones. I may now have to stop eating so much fry up and biscuits… #PhDLife
This years Society for Music Analysis (SMA) conference was held at City University London. Here, I presented the work of my second pilot study and explained the next stages of my PhD. This was a useful setting to get feedback on the change of direction in my PhD (to focus on harmonic similarity), along with getting general feedback and questions on my thesis work. The feedback was positive, and stimulating discussions surrounding the application of my work to forensic musicology followed. I also attended a variety of presentations on Neo-Riemannian theory, topic theory, popular music and formal function. For me, a highlight was the session on combined methods and Neo-Riemannian analysis.
SMA Summer School
Following on from CityMAC I attend this year’s SMA summer school.
What a wonderful, inspiring group of people, pictured at the end of two incredibly rewarding days at the SMA Summer School @SocMusAnalysispic.twitter.com/sKKthBjHXl
Here we were given a variety of plenary lectures and seminars from three distinguished lecturers within the field of music analysis: Janet Schmalfeldt, Nicole Biamonte and David Bretherton. They each covered very different topics, with sonata form, popular music analysis and queer theory being the most prominent topics. The summer school not only gave the opportunity to learn and revise our existing music analysis knowledge but again a chance to network with academics and students in a productive environment. I found the hands-on approach of Janet’s seminar particularly useful for consolidating my undergraduate teaching of sonata form.
For me, the discussions on pedagogy and how we might go about teaching music analysis ourselves were very valuable. In the autmn, I will be providing an introduction to music analysis to masters students in Utrecht University as part of my research placement there, and the discussions of the summer school enabled me to reflect upon not only how to approach teaching this, but the sort of repertoire I may use as examples.
This blog post was co-written by myself and also Clarissa Brough (a colleague of mine from Web Science).
In Taiwan, we were lucky enough to be invited to two research institutions, National Chiao Tung University in Hsinchu and Academia Sinica in Taipei. Here, we looked around their research facilities and engaged in discussions about AI, Web Science and our own PhD research.
National Chiao Tung University
The National Chiao Tung University sign.
Day 1
What a fabulous first day at National Chiao Tung University. This is what we got up to this morning… pic.twitter.com/yKhxDpbTm7
Our time at National Chiao Tung University began at their Hakka Studies College. The campus itself was very interesting, built to reflect and strengthen the multi-ethnic Hakka culture in the area. Not only dedicated to Hakka cultural studies, the college is also a centre for science, technology and society. As part of our tour around the campus, we visited the VR Studio and trialled the latest virtual reality game based on Hakka culture, which had been created by the students. Some of us were much better than others…. We then visited the communication and cognition laboratory and were shown current research by Masters’ students. We experimented with their eye tracking and emotion tracking technology and discussed the vast possibilities and applications of what they have been studying (including how they are using this work to track how people view websites for advertising). To end our tour, we looked around their state-of-the-art television studio, where students had the opportunity to create and apply virtual environments to recordings. All of this was helped by the use of a ten million dollar camera! At lunch, we were taken to have the famous beef noodle soup (the national dish!).
Anna playing the VR game on Hakka culture.
Clarissa Brough playing the VR game on Hakka culture.
A photo of the eye-tracking technology.
A photo of the emotion-tracking technology.
Clarissa in the state-of-the-art television studio, using the ten million dollar camera.
Most of the afternoon was spent in a meeting with researchers from Computer Science who were currently using AI for drone technology. They each presented their research which included: the use of drones for face recognition, speed monitoring and flying in formation. Being from Web Science, we not only asked about the AI technology involved but also the societal implications of their research, including the ethical considerations. It was clear that they had not really engaged in these kind of thought processes before but they were more than willing to engage in a lively discussion.
To end our first day, two students kindly took us on a tour of parts of Hsinchu, where we sampled the very popular bubble tea, visited a temple and trialled some of the local sweet treats. We also attended a concert in the evening put on by the Masters performance students for their end-of-year exam. The performances were all of a very high standard, offering a very varied and interesting repertoire.
Beef noodle soup!
One of the temples we were taken round.
One of the temples we were taken round.
Day 2
As we are currently both based in Music, the second day started with a tour of National Chiao Tung’s music department, which had only recently been built. The department was solely for Masters’ students in performance and musicology. The practice rooms in particular were very state-of-the-art. We briefly discussed our research with the academics in music, who were interested in our interdisciplinary nature, before being involved in a meeting with the President of the University. Here, alongside President Chang, academics from music and computer science engaged in discussion about the Web Science Institute at Southampton, the research we do and potential future collaborations. President Chang was impressed with the Institute’s aim and seemed keen on future collaborations for both students and our research, including a scheme they have for students to do some time of their PhD in Taiwan.
A welcome sign placed for us on route to our meeting with president Chang.
A photo with all those involved with our meeting with President Chang. This included academics from Music, Computer Science, the International Office and our delegation from the University of Southampton
In the afternoon, we took part in a colloquium with students from National Chiao Tung University. Dr Tom Irvine first provided a brief presentation about Web Science at Southampton, with us on hand to help answer any questions. Then, in turn, we presented our own research and answered questions from the audience. Three computer science students from Chiao Tung presented their research, much of which was based in AI. Of particular interest to our own work, one presentation discussed the use of social media data mining to improve online recommendations, including those given by music-based platforms.
Clarissa presenting in the afternoon colloquium.
A photo of all those involved in the afternoons colloquium.
Our final night in Hsinchu was spent at a local restaurant with academics from music and computer science. We got to try lots of new food, including a delicacy known as a ‘century egg’. The meal also gave us an opportunity to reflect on our time at the university and the potential for future collaborations.
Our main team, the group of musicologists and computer scientists whom we spent the majority of the trip with.
Academia Sinica: The 5th Taiwanese Music and Audio Computing Workshop.
Day 1
We experienced the high-speed rail network, traveling from Hsinchu to Taipei. In Taipei, we visited Academia Sinica and their Music and Audio Computing Lab. The lab is dedicated to developing multimedia systems, using, for instance, deep learning for music information retrieval. The lab is conducting research very relevant to our own, which Anna had heard about at ISMIR 2017, so we were excited to take part and present in their ‘5th Taiwanese Music and Audio Computing Workshop’.
Academia Sinica sign’s.
Academia Sinica sign’s.
The first session was dedicated to presentations from academics, with Dr Tom Irvine providing an overview of Web Science and it’s iPhD. Questions addressed the content of taught modules and the types of students who apply, which we helped to answer. Following this, Yi-Hsuan Yang, from Academia Sinica, presented some of his current research. He gave live examples of a machine DJ that could recognise the BPM of tracks and successfully mix them together as well as a way to extract instruments from a piece of pop music and play different layers of the music. Ching-hua Chuan, from the University of Miami whom is using deep learning for modelling polyphonic music. As someone working with score-based music theory in the Music Information Retrieval community, this project was of high interest to Anna, and she has made an invaluable contact, whom she has kept in contact with since the workshop. Finally, Satoru Fukayama, a visiting composer from Japan, presented possible ways for automated music generation to aid in the act of composing. This caused us to question the role of the human composer in machine-generated contexts.
Dr Irvine presenting an introduction to Web Science.
The afternoon was dedicated to student presentations, in which we took part. These presentations included the use of multi-track sequential generative adversarial networks for music generation and canonical time warping. Our own presentations were received well. The audience were highly impressed by Anna’s use of score-based methods for music recommendation, something which the Music and Audio Computing Lab themselves have not researched. Clarissa’s presentation, although more sociological in nature, also prompted some interesting questions from the audience, particularly about the role of the user in recommendations – again highlighting the fact that often these aspects of research, the highly interdisciplinary aspect, is often overlooked.
I am a student as part of the Web Science DTC, and recently we were given the opportunity (myself a few of my colleagues) to travel to East Asia, first Hong Kong and then on to Taiwan to present our research and discuss collaboration possibilities. I spent a total of 10 days out there. And will post a couple of blog posts now covering my time over there.
Hong Kong: East Asian Research Students Conference at Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)
Day 1
The first day at CUHK was based around small group workshops, where we discussed our research and presented it to others interested in the field – I attended the western music theory and analysis group. I found it useful to show how my research relates to other fields and also how this traditional discipline of music theory relates to the developments of the web. The day finished with a keynote presentation by Alexander Rehding from Harvard, whose recent work with Harvard’s Sound Lab explores the interaction of music theory, culture and technology.
Having a fabulous first day in Hong Kong at #EARS@CUHKofficial, including (really useful) music theory seminar day, now time for Alexander Rehding’s keynote and tomorrow student presentations! What a beautiful campus, at 31-degree heat…
The presenters from the University of Southampton Music Department, including (from left to right) Chenyin Tang, Kaho Inoue, Anna Kent-Muller and Dr Thomas Irvine.
Day 2
Day two was busy; here each student involved gave a lightning presentation on their research, the conference aspect of the work. This gave me a chance to present my work in a different professional environment, and gain feedback and questions. We finished off the evening enjoying some delicious food in a local restaurant.
I am recently back from a trip to Durham for this year’s Society of Music Analysis Graduate Students Conference (TAGS). I enjoyed the trip not only as a delegate but as one of the SMA PGR representative, it was exciting to engage with other PGR’s and learn what their research is about. Our community is so diverse, and the work everyone is doing is exciting and influential. I especially enjoyed presentations on SoundScape and the combination of different music theoretical models it a group model.
This was my first presentation on the results of my listening study https://musicsimilarity.soton.ac.uk/. Here I analysed two questions results and their musical materials used.
I enjoyed my trip to Durham, it was beautiful as a place, along with a really influential and growing music department. There is a strong community feel at the University and therefore it was a pleasure to be a part of that for the weekend.
The walk up to the Music Building
The cathedral, as seen whilst walking past to the music building.
The cathedral again.
To reflect upon the presentation I gave in Durham, I was happy with how I generally presented it. I am beginning to form a presentation style, which still needs development, but I am getting close to this. The nerves are reducing and I am getting into the swing of how to do this ‘academic conference’ lark.
I would say, however, that I felt that I tried to cover too much information and therefore it felt rushed and was not as strong in content as my previous presentations have been. The most useful part of conferences is in the question sessions and with discussing with people after the presentation. I found it useful to discuss features such as ‘rhythm’ that I had not considered, along with discussing aspects of my research. I enjoyed discussing objectivity and subjectivity in music analysis, and my research in particular. I have learnt from this presentation, and how my research will be received by the Music Analysis community.
I aimed for this presentation to learn how the Music Analysis community would interact with my research. This was my first presentation to the community, and I feel my work was generally well received and that the benefits and the application of my work was understood. I am looking forward to presenting again to the community in July, at CityMac which my paper has recently been accepted to.
During the last week I have been in the Netherlands to give two papers, the first at the Netherlands Institute for permanent access to digital research resources (DANS). Here, i had been invited to give a similar to paper as to the one i gave in Shanghai for the Digital Libraries for Musicology workshop. This presentation went very well, and it really gave us a chance to discuss collaboration and how we can work together to further the field of musicology through my proposal of a ‘Big Musicology Project’.
This presentation started important discussions on a possible working group to develop an interdisciplinary network of those interested in the digitisation of musical resources in computer-readable formats. We looked at how the Semantic Web and other prominent technologies can be utilised to further this collaboration.
My second paper was given at Utrecht University, at their Music Similarity Lab. Here, I presented on the work of my PhD to this point. This included discussion on how to quantify music similarity from music theory. This chance to discuss my work at their lab enabled me to find out more about the field of music similarity – from a lab which specialises in it. We talked about how to compare different melodic similarity methods with the ones that i proposed. My Women in Music Information Retrieval mentor, Anja Volk, works at this lab and therefore i also got a chance to start discussions with her on how we can collaborate and how we are going to move forward with this.
Today in the ‘adventures of Anna the PhD researcher’ I am off to @UtrechtUni to their Music Similairty lab. We hope to talk about collaboration possibilities and to find the commonalities between our work. I also have my first @Women_MIR mentor session!
Overall this was another successful PhD trip. I am looking forward to now having a few months to focus on my PhD research and look at my upgrade work. I also hope to start my PhD listening experiment really soon, and then my interviews in the near future.
I have just got back, well a couple of days ago, from my most recent conference the British Forum for Ethnomusicology and the Royal Musical Association postgraduate students conference. This is a lively conference where postgraduate researchers get together to support each other in presenting their research. This conference is a great place to showcase the early stages of your work and get feedback from students and academics within the field, in a friendly and supportive environment.
This was the first paper I have given on my thesis research directly. Here I explored how I am using one method of quantifying musical similairities from a melodic line. I have built upon the work of Hirata and Matsuda, and showed how we can extend their model to discuss other prominent methods of music analysis in this way. I always find the most useful components of any conference paper is the chance to discuss and answer questions on your topic. I was given interesting topics that questioned why I was using traditional music theories, and why I was not interested in the traditional ‘genre’ classification.
For anyone interested the abstract I provided for the conference was as follows:
The release of Napster in 1999 saw exponential growth of online music streaming. This has inspired the development of tools to discover new music, typically as part of applications such as Spotify. Music recommendation often suggests new music to users based on their own and others’ preferences (Herlocker et al., 2004; Celma, 2010) or audio-based methods of “similarity” analysis (Downie, 2008). I propose that score-based musical analysis can provide a more useful similarity comparison than audio analysis.
To date, there has been a lack of success in extracting high-level musical features from audio. In contrast, traditional music analysis methods (e.g. Schenker) enable the evaluation of high-level musical features, including harmony, timbre, and melody. These features could be compared to determine the similarity of two pieces of music. I will discuss how traditional music analysis methods can be utilised to determine musical similarity and propose ways of quantifying similarity to enable computation. Additionally, I will report on the provisional findings of a listener study examining the perceived audibility of theoretical definitions of musical similarity.
This work will enable cross-genre musical recommendation based on the fundamental features of a piece of music. For the consumer this means more relevant and accurate recommendations, and for the emerging artists greater exposure.
The conference was a great opportunity to begin to share my thesis research, and introduce the concepts I am developing to the wider research community. The University of Southampton was strongly represented, and we have a great time – especially enjoying afternoon tea.
My next presentation is on the 23rd January at DANS in the Netherlands.
Anna Selway 