Douglas Eck Ph.D.

Here is a new and improved summary of the Search Inside the Music music recommendation project.

For non-research types: A few months ago I described my research to an old friend from high school. My wife later read the email and said it was pretty easy to understand. So here it is.

I spend half of my time at LISA, the University of Montreal Montreal machine learning lab. I spend the other half of my time at the Brain, Music and Sound (BRAMS) research center affiliated with the University of Montreal, McGill University and the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI). Here's a picture of the Boesendorfer piano in my lab at BRAMS with lab technician (and electroacoustic composer) Dominic Thibault. Click on the image for a higer-resolution version:

My overall area of research is machine learning in the domain of music. Specific research areas (past and present) include:

• Measuring music similarity and recommending music (see the SITM description page)
• Music sequence generation. (Here are some examples using LSTM recurrent neural networks)
• Expression: Realistic Performance Timing and Dynamics
• Tracking: Finding Beat and Tempo in a Musical Performance
• Synchronization: Playing with Musicians in Real Time

For more information, see my publications list, my CV and my research statement. (Note my publications list is not sorted by publication type but the publications in my CV are sorted.)

See also my tech talk at Google on Automatically Tagging Audio Files Using Supervised Learning on Acoustic Features (Video)