Overview
The MIDAS Computational Music Theory Symposium is a first-of-its-kind event at the University of Michigan, aimed at creating dialogues between the worlds of music theory and the computational/data sciences. Interest in fostering such dialogues has been growing in recent years, and has led to exciting collaborations at U-M and beyond, for example in the computational modeling of musical structure, creating databases for musical corpora, research in the digital humanities, and so on. To inspire and nurture more such work, the MIDAS Computational Music Theory Symposium will feature workshops and talks by a number of prominent music theorists from around the country, on research at the intersection of data science, computing and music theory—in addition to panel discussions between them and several data and computational scientists at the University of Michigan.
Program
Time TBD · Session on Empirical Approaches to Form · Watkins Hall, SMTD
Presentations by:
- Christopher Brody, University of Kentucky
- Daphne Tan, University of Toronto
- David Sears, Texas Tech University
- Benjamin Duane, Washington University
9:30 – 9:45 · Introductory Remarks, Dr. David Gier, Dean, SMTD · Watkins Hall, SMTD
9:45 – 11:15 · Panel on “What is Computational Music Theory?” · Watkins Hall, SMTD
Panelists:
- David Temperley, Eastman School of Music
- Johanna Devaney, City University of New York
- Christopher White, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
- Daphne Tan, University of Toronto
- David Sears, Texas Tech University
- Benjamin Duane, Washington University
- Christopher Brody, University of Kentucky
11:30 – 12:00 · Presentation by David Temperley, Eastman School of Music · Watkins Hall, SMTD
David Temperley is a music theorist, cognitive scientist, and composer. He received his PhD in music theory from Columbia University, followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at Ohio State University. Since 2000, he has been professor of music theory at Eastman. Temperley’s primary research area is computational modeling of music cognition; he has explored issues such as meter perception, key perception, harmonic analysis, and melodic expectation. His first book, _The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures_ (MIT, 2001) won the Society for Music Theory’s Emerging Scholar Award; his second book, _Music and Probability_ (MIT, 2007) explores computational music cognition from a probabilistic perspective; his third book, _The Musical Language of Rock_ (Oxford, 2018), is a theoretical-analytical study of rock music, focusing on dimensions such as key/scale, harmony, rhythm, melody, timbre/instrumentation, and form. Temperley also has a strong secondary interest in language research: parsing, sentence production/comprehension, and corpus research.
12:00 – 12:30 · Presentation by Johanna Devaney, City University of New York · Watkins Hall, SMTD
Johanna Devaney is an Assistant Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. At Brooklyn College she teaches primarily in the Music Technology and Sonic Arts areas and at the Graduate Center she is appointed to the Music Theory faculty. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor of Music Theory and Cognition at Ohio State University and a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) at the University of California at Berkeley. Johanna completed her PhD in music technology at the Schulich School of Music of McGill University. She also holds an MPhil degree in music theory from Columbia University and an MA in composition from York University in Toronto.
12:30 – 1:00 · Presentation by Christopher White, University of Massachusetts, Amherst · Watkins Hall, SMTD
Christopher Wm. White is an Assistant Professor of Music Theory the University of Massachusetts Amherst, having previously taught at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Yale University.
Chris received his PhD from Yale and has also attended Queens College–CUNY, and Oberlin College Conservatory of Music. His articles have appeared in Music Perception and in Mathematics and Computation in Music and he has presented papers at national meetings of the Society for Music Theory as well as several regional conferences. His research investigates algorithmic and linguistic theories of music by presenting computational models of musical style, function, meter, and communication. Chris’ research has also focused on geometrically modeling early 20th-century musics, especially the music of Alexander Scriabin and Alban Berg.
Chris remains an avid organist, having studied with Haskell Thompson and James David Christie. As a member of the Three Penny Chorus and Orchestra, he has appeared on NBC’s Today Show and as a quarterfinalist on America’s Got Talent.
3:30 – 4:30 · MIDAS Seminar: Ichiro Fujinaga, McGill University · Rackham Amphitheatre
Ichiro Fujinaga is an Associate Professor of Music Technology at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). He holds Bachelor’s degrees in Music Theory and Percussion and Mathematics from the University of Alberta as well as a Master’s degree in Music Theory and a Ph.D. in Music Technology from McGill University. In 2003-2004, he was the Acting Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT) at McGill. In 2002-2003, he was the Chair of the Music Technology Area at the McGill School of Music. Prior to this, he was a faculty member of the Computer Music Department at the Peabody Conservatory of Music of the Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, United States). His research interests include machine learning, music information retrieval, phonograph digitization, distributed digital music archives and libraries, music perception, and optical music recognition. Fujinaga is also a researcher associated with the Daniel Langlois Foundation’s DOCAM research alliance.
5:00 – 6:00 · Demonstration by Ichiro Fujinaga, McGill University · Rackham Amphitheatre
9:00 – 11:00 · Workshop by Aaron Carter-Ényì, Morehouse College
9:45 – 11:15 · Panel on “What is Computational Music Theory?” · Watkins Hall, SMTD
Aaron Carter-Ényì is an Assistant Professor of Music at Morehouse College, an all-male historically-black college (HBCU) in Atlanta. He teaches music theory, class piano, and music appreciation in Morehouse’s Department of Music and Introduction to World Musics at neighboring Spelman College, an all-female HBCU. He holds a PhD from Ohio State University (2016), was a Fulbright Scholar to Nigeria in 2013 and a 2017 fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). In addition to Nigeria, he has conducted fieldwork in Benin, China, Ethiopia, Ghana and Kenya and domestically in the United States. Aaron’s research integrates humanistic and empirical analysis of music and speech with ethnographic and historical evidence to provide a broader understanding of the diversity of human experience and culture. Recent scholarship appears in Africa (Journal of the International African Institute), Ethnomusicology, Music Theory Online, Performance Research, Sounding Out!, Tonal Aspects of Languages, and Voice and Speech Review. He is the director of the interdisciplinary Africana Digital Ethnography Project (ADEPt) and is currently developing the open-source software ATAVizM, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. During the summer, he is an instructor for federally-sponsored student enrichment programs including MSEIP and iSTEM for which he provides workshops and courses in the Morehouse Makerspace. Aaron lives with his wife, Quintina Carter-Enyi, and son, Arinze, in Atlanta. Quintina and Aaron often perform music together and have co-authored several articles.
11:15 – 11:45 · Presentation by Leigh VanHandel, Michigan State University
Leigh VanHandel is Associate Professor of music theory at the Michigan State University College of Music, with a courtesy appointment in Cognitive Science.
She received a Bachelor of Music from the Ohio State University, a Master of Music from SUNY Stony Brook, and a Doctor of Philosophy from Stanford University. Her dissertation was titled “Setting a Menu to Music: Prosody and Melody in 19th-century Art Song,” and was a quantitative study of the relationship between speech intonation and rhythm patterns in spoken German and French and the melody and rhythm of art songs written to texts in those languages. She previously taught at the University of Oregon and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Her research interests include music cognition, music theory pedagogy, the relationship between music and language, computer applications in music research and pedagogy, and how all of those things relate to each other.
1:15 – 3:15 · Workshop by Daniel Shanahan, Ohio State University
Daniel Shanahan is assistant professor of music theory and cognition at The Ohio State University. Before arriving at OSU, Daniel was director of the Music Cognition and Computation Lab at Louisiana State University, where he also taught undergraduate and graduate music theory. He previously taught music theory, history and cognition at the University of Virginia.
Daniel’s research interests include music and emotion, the diffusion of musical style, corpus studies, and the computational analysis of jazz and folk music.
3:30 – 5:00 · Panel on Building Bridges between Data Science and Music
Panelists:
- Daniel Shanahan, Ohio State University
- Gregory Wakefield, University of Michigan
- Aaron Carter-Ényì, Morehouse College
- Leigh Van Handel, Michigan State University
3:30 – 4:30 · MIDAS Seminar: Ichiro Fujinaga, McGill University · Rackham Amphitheatre
Ichiro Fujinaga is an Associate Professor of Music Technology at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). He holds Bachelor’s degrees in Music Theory and Percussion and Mathematics from the University of Alberta as well as a Master’s degree in Music Theory and a Ph.D. in Music Technology from McGill University. In 2003-2004, he was the Acting Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT) at McGill. In 2002-2003, he was the Chair of the Music Technology Area at the McGill School of Music. Prior to this, he was a faculty member of the Computer Music Department at the Peabody Conservatory of Music of the Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, United States). His research interests include machine learning, music information retrieval, phonograph digitization, distributed digital music archives and libraries, music perception, and optical music recognition. Fujinaga is also a researcher associated with the Daniel Langlois Foundation’s DOCAM research alliance.
5:00 · Closing Remarks, Dr. Jing Liu, Managing Director, Michigan Institute for Data and AI in Society, University of Michigan
Co-organizers
- Somangshu Mukherji, Assistant Professor of Music Theory, SMTD, University of Michigan
- Áine Heneghan, Associate Professor of Music Theory, SMTD, University of Michigan
- Nathan Martin, Assistant Professor of Music Theory, SMTD, University of Michigan
- René Rusch, Assistant Professor of Music Theory, SMTD, University of Michigan
Sponsors
MIDAS and ArtsEngine
Questions? Contact Us.
For questions, please contact midas-contact@umich.edu