On Friday, 14 May, 2021, Euraxess ASEAN presented Dorien Herremans and Elaine Chew in their Meet My Lab webinar moderated by Lonce Wyse. The discussion focussed on their joint work on the MorpheuS music generation system created during Dorien’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action Fellowship. Thanks are due to Daniel Bedoya for help with triggering the MorpheuS music examples.
Mathematics and Music: A Synergetic Duo for Automatic Music Generation and Representation
In its more than 60 year history, music generation systems have never been more popular than today. In this talk, Prof Dorien Herremans (Singapore University of Technology and Design, SUTD) gives a brief history of the unique field of algorithmic composition. While there are a number of systems out there, two main challenges remain: how do we integrate emotion as well as ensure long term structure in musical pieces. It should come at no surprise that music and emotion are intrinsically connected. Yet, computer systems still struggle to truly capture emotion. Secondly, while many systems can compose short fragments that sound well, the real challenge is to create complete, longer pieces of music with patterns and themes. The MorpheuS system, a hybrid machine learning system developed by Prof Dorien during her MSCA fellowship with Prof Elaine Chew (senior CNRS researcher in the STMS Lab at IRCAM), tackles these two challenges. In this talk they dive into the inner workings of MorpheuS, as well as listen to a number of generated fragments performed by Prof Elaine Chew. Finally, we will discuss some recent advances in the field and what respective labs are currently working on. The session is moderated by Dr Lonce Wyse of National University of Singapore (NUS).
