Fwd: Two Research Fellows in Machine Listening / Semantic Audio-Visual Processing and Interaction

Dear Music-and-Science people,

Please forward the following postdoc opportunities to anyone who may be interested, esp anyone who may want to apply music sound processing background to everyday sounds. Apologies for cross-posting.

Post 1: Research Fellow in Machine Listening
http://jobs.surrey.ac.uk/079715

Post 2: Research Fellow in Semantic Audio-Visual Processing and Interaction
http://jobs.surrey.ac.uk/079415

Deadline: 13 December 2015

Additional information below.

Many thanks,

Mark Plumbley

----

University of Surrey, Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences

Centre for Vision Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP)

Salary:  GBP 30,738 to GBP 35,609

Closing Date:  Sunday 13 December 2015

Reference (Post 1):  079715; Reference (Post 2): 079415

Applications are invited for two Research Fellows to work full-time on an EPSRC-funded project "Making Sense of Sounds" for 33 months starting January 2016. This project will investigate how to make sense from sound data, focussing on how to convert sound recordings into understandable and actionable information, and specifically how to allow people to search, browse and interact with sounds.

For Post 1 (Research Fellow in Machine Listening), the candidate will be responsible for investigating and developing machine learning methods for separation and analysis of everyday sounds, leading to new representations to support search, retrieval and interaction with sound.

The successful applicant for Post 1 is expected to have a PhD in electronic engineering, computer science or a related subject, and is expected to have significant research experience in audio signal processing. Research experience in one or more of: machine learning; blind source separation, blind de-reverberation, sparse and/or non-negative representations, deep learning, object-based audio representations, audio feature extraction, and/or large scale data processing is desirable.

For Post 2 (Research Fellow in Semantic Audio-Visual Processing and Interaction), the candidate will be responsible for investigating how complementary and heterogeneous data modalities and interfaces will help analysis and interaction with sound-focussed data, including how visual information and context can assist exploration, identification and interpretation of audio events.

The successful applicant for Post 2 is expected to have a PhD in electronic engineering, computer science or a related subject, and is expected to have significant research experience in machine learning, machine translation, semantic audio and/or audio-visual perception. Research experience in one or more of: audio retrieval and labelling, audio tagging, sound summarization, active learning, audio-visual signal processing, human computer interaction, and/or spatial audio visualisation is desirable.

The project will be led by Prof Mark Plumbley in the Machine Audition Lab of the Centre for Vision Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP) at the University of Surrey, in collaboration with the Digital World Research Centre (DWRC) at Surrey and the University of Salford. The postholders will be based in CVSSP and work under the direction of Prof Plumbley and Co-Investigators Dr Wenwu Wang and Dr Philip Jackson.

CVSSP  is one of the largest groups of its type in the UK, with over 120 active researchers working in the areas of vision, image processing, medical imaging, and audio, and a grant portfolio of over £12M. The Centre has state-of-the-art acoustic capture and analysis facilities enabling research into audio source separation, music transcription and spatial audio, and a Visual Media Lab with video and audio capture facilities supporting research in real-time video and audio processing and visualisation.

Informal enquires are welcome, to: Prof Mark Plumbley (m.plumbley@surrey.ac.uk), Dr Wenwu Wang (w.wang@surrey.ac.uk), or Dr Philip Jackson (p.jackson@surrey.ac.uk).

Expected start date: As soon as possible

Further Details:

 * Post 1: Research Fellow in Machine Listening - http://jobs.surrey.ac.uk/079715

 * Post 2: Research Fellow in Semantic Audio-Visual Processing and Interaction -  http://jobs.surrey.ac.uk/079415

--
Prof Mark D Plumbley
Professor of Signal Processing
Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP)
University of Surrey
Guildford, Surrey, GU2 7XH, UK
Email: m.plumbley@surrey.ac.uk

UCL Chamber Choir

UCL Chamber Music Club choir is currently rehearsing for the Christmas concert on 15th December.  There are still vacancies in the choir, particularly for tenors and basses.  Rehearsals are on Thursdays at 5.30 pm in the basement lecture theatre in Wolfson House, Stephenson Way (near Euston station).  The main work being prepared is Bach's Lutheran Mass in G minor - a quite complex but very rewarding piece. 

Recruits to the choir need to be competent readers, and some choral experience would be useful though not essential. 

For further information, please contact Roger Beeson (rabeemus@gmail.com) or the conductor Bryan Solomon (b.solomon@ucl.ac.uk), or simply come along to the next rehearsal.

Fwd: AHRC-funded PhD studentships at the RNCM

Dear all,

 

 

Please do forward this to students who may be interested in PhDs at the RNCM in Composition, Musicology, Music Psychology and Performance Research.

 

 

http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AMJ957/phd-studentships-in-music/

 

The Royal Northern College of Music invites high-quality applications for three-year PhD studentships, fully funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The RNCM is one of the seven members of the North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership. These prestigious and highly competitive studentships cover the full cost of fees and an additional stipend for living costs (UK applicants only) of £14,057 per annum.

Expert supervision is available at RNCM for PhD study in composition, musicology (sources and editions, cultural history, analysis and aesthetics), music psychology and cognate disciplines, and music performance (both performance practice and practice-based research). For further information about staff research expertise see www.rncm.ac.uk/research/staff.

 

Postgraduate research students benefit from the vibrant specialised musical environment at the RNCM and participate in the broader research community within the North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership. There are opportunities for interdisciplinary and cross-institutional projects as well placements with our non-HEI partners. Research degrees at RNCM are validated and awarded by Manchester Metropolitan University, so students draw on training and expertise at both institutions.

Applications must be received by 5pm on 7 January 2016. Outstanding applicants who are offered places at RNCM will be put forward for the AHRC competition (application deadline 12 February 2016).

For information about PhD research at RNCM please see www.rncm.ac.uk/research/programme/postgraduate, read the Guidelines for Applicants atwww.rncm.ac.uk/research/programme/apply and contact the appropriate member of staff.

 

For information about the AHRC-funded studentships, please see www.nwcdtp.ac.uk/howtoapply.

Applicants for studentships will usually hold a first-class or good upper-second undergraduate degree and have achieved merit or distinction level in a Master's degree.

Contact details. RNCM Research Department research@rncm.ac.uk; tel: 0161 907 5228

===============================

 

Best wishes,

 

Chrissy

 

Christina Brand

Research and Knowledge Exchange Manager

Royal Northern College of Music
124 Oxford Road
Manchester
M13 9RD
T 0161 907 5386
E Christina.Brand@rncm.ac.uk
www.rncm.ac.uk 

Twitter: @rncmresearch 

 

Fwd: SIG Notice: Bridging curriculum and children’s musicking: recruiting South African children’s multimodal musical games as resources for musical education - UCL Institute of Education - 23rd November 2015

Music Education Special Interest Group

Research Seminar Announcement

 

Bridging curriculum and children's musicking: recruiting South African children's multimodal musical games as resources for musical education

Dr Susan Harrop-Allin, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

 

Monday 23rd November 2015

16.30 – 17.30

Room: 944

 

Further details from Lucy Green, l.green@ioe.ac.uk

 

All are welcome

 

Musical play is recognised internationally as a universal feature of childhood. Like children in playgrounds all over the world, many South African children are actively engaged in a range of artistic practices, particularly musical play, outside the classroom. These are self-created, transmitted and adapted according to children's musical identities and interests. However, these multimodal musical practices are seldom recognised as embodying children's prior musical capacities and skills, nor are they recognised as music.  This is especially the case in South African music education, where musical epistemologies are problematically articulated in the Creative and Performing Arts curriculum. The result is a dislocation between curriculum and 'local' musical practices, classroom and playground, and between prescribed curriculum knowledge and music in everyday life. State school teachers are bound by a curriculum that conceptualises music as a written literacy and decontextualizes musical elements, facts and skills from their practices, which can result in little active music-making taking place. The paper illustrates some ways in which, by recognising children's musical games as musicking, and "recruiting" them for pedagogy, teachers may begin to overcome the many challenges of music education curriculum implementation in South Africa. I will show some typical musical games documented in Soweto primary schools, demonstrating how their hybridity, multimodal and intertextual features are located within South African urban musical cultures and how the games reveal children's sound design capacities. The paper finally suggests that musical play be considered as valuable resources and sources of prior musical knowledge for all children; that they be recruited as resources (rather than simply reiterated) for music education for transformative learning.

 

Dr. Susan Harrop-Allin is a lecturer, pianist and teacher-educator who has worked in music development and teaching in South Africa for twenty five years. In recognition of her community music development work, she was one of three arts and culture finalists for the national Shoprite/Checkers Woman of the Year award in 2004. Susan holds a Performer's Licentiate (ABRSM) and PhD in music education and ethnomusicology from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where she lectures in the Schools of Arts and Education. She is developing Community Music as a new area of higher education teaching and research in South Africa, piloting student service-learning projects and supporting community music initiatives in HaMakuya, northern Limpopo. Susan also trains Arts and Culture teachers for arts NGOs and performs as an accompanist and chamber musician with Il Trio Rosso and as a member of The Chanticleer Singers. She publishes and researches in the area of community music, ethnomusicology and music education, presents papers at international conferences and has published several book chapters and journal articles in international and local publications. She is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Community Music and a director of the Johannesburg Youth Orchestra Company and Rena Le Lona Arts Centre for Children in Soweto.

Fwd: DEADLINE EXTENDED (15 November): Virtuosity – An interdisciplinary symposium, Budapest, 3–6 March 2016

Virtuosity – An interdisciplinary symposium
The Liszt Academy of Music, Budapest
3–6 March 2016

CALL FOR PAPERS

We are pleased to announce the joint symposium of the Kodály Institute of the Liszt Academy and ESCOM (European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music), an interdisciplinary event to be held in Budapest, in the beautifully restored Art Nouveau palace of the Liszt Academy between 3 and 6 March 2016.

We invite proposals for individual papers (20 minutes, followed by 10 minutes of discussion) and posters. The language of the symposium is English.

Theme and topics
We invite submissions for a symposium on virtuosity in music performance that address questions such as the following:
·               What is virtuosity?
·               How virtuosity is perceived in different ways by musicians and their audiences in different cultures?
·               How might virtuosity be studied empirically?
·               What are the cognitive, neuropsychological and motor mechanisms underpinning virtuosity?
·               What is the relationship between virtuosity and creativity?
·               What is the relationship between virtuosity and enchantment (or 'magic')? To what extent can virtuosity be considered the making of magic? Or can be magic be made in the absence of virtuosity?
·               How might virtuosity be taught?

Keynotes

Daniel Leech-Wilkinson (King's College London)

Tania Lisboa (Royal College of Music, London)

Fredrik Ullén (Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm)

 

Proposals
All submissions must address the symposium theme. Please send us an abstract of approximately 250 words as an e-mail attachment in Word format to virtuosity@lisztacademy.hu, specifying whether the proposal is for a theoretical paper, an empirical paper, or a poster. All proposals will be peer-reviewed by the members of an international review committee. In order to ensure anonymity, please do not include personal details in the abstract. The name(s) of the author(s), institutional affiliation and a short biography of approx. 100 words should be sent in a separate Word document. Please indicate in your cover letter your AV requirements and whether the presentation will involve live performance, and if so what instruments are envisaged.

Deadlines
Submission of abstracts (EXTENDED): 15 November 2015
Notification for acceptances: 30 November 2015

Programme and registration
The programme of the symposium will be announced in January 2016. Online registration will open in January 2016. For additional information please contact Dr László Stachó (stacho.laszlo@lisztacademy.hu) or Ms Éva Gyöngy Máté (mate.eva.gyongy@lisztacademy.hu).

Organising Committee
László Stachó (Liszt Academy of Music, Budapest), chair of the Organising Committee
László Norbert Nemes (Liszt Academy of Music, Budapest), co-chair of the Organising Committee
Jane Ginsborg (Royal Northern College of Music)
Peter Keller (The MARCS Institute, University of Western Sydney)
Jukka Louhivuori (University of Jyväskylä)
Richard Parncutt (University of Graz)

 

Fwd: CfP - 1st Conferene on Computer Simulation of Musical Creativity. Huddersfield, UK

Dear all,

We are happy to announce the first Conference on Computer Simulation of Musical Creativity. The event will be held at the University of Huddersfield (UK) from 17 to 19 June 2016.

 

Conference Website: https://csmc2016.wordpress.com/

Keynote speakers

• Professor Graeme Bailey, Cornell University
• Professor Geraint Wiggins, Queen Mary University London

Key Dates

• Deadline for paper submission: 15 March 2016
• Notification of acceptance: 15 April 2016
• Deadline for revisions and camera-ready copy: 30 April 2016

Submissions can cover both theoretical and/or practical aspects of the computer simulation of musical creativity. Interdisciplinary proposals at the intersection of music, computer science, psychology and philosophy are welcome. Topics of interest may include, but are not limited to:

Computer Systems

• systems capable of generating music;
• systems capable of performing music;
• systems capable of (online) improvisation;
• systems capable of analysing music;
• music-robotic systems;
• systems implementing societies of virtual musicians;
• systems that foster and enhance the musical creativity of human users;
• music recommendation systems;
• systems implementing computational aesthetics, emotional responses, novelty and originality;

Theory

• surveys of state-of-the-art techniques in the area;
• validation methodologies;
• philosophical foundations of creative music systems;
• mathematical foundations of creative music systems;
• evolutionary models for creative music systems;
• cognitive models for creative music systems;
• studies on the applicability of music-creative techniques to other research areas;
• new models for improving creative music systems.

Peer-Review Process and Proceedings

All papers are double-blind peer reviewed by at least two specialists. Proceedings will be published online. Extended versions of selected papers will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Creative Music Systems (http://jcms.org.uk/).

Paper Submission

Details of submission procedure and formatting can be found at https://csmc2016.wordpress.com/instructions-for-authors/.

For enquiries, please contact Valerio Velardo at valerio.velardo@hud.ac.uk.

Best wishes,

Valerio Velardo

Choral practice, performance and pedagogy: real world applications of choral research

CALL FOR PAPERS

Choral practice, performance and pedagogy: real world applications of choral research

Department of Music, The University of Sheffield, in partnership with the Institute of Musical Research.

Friday 8^th April 2016

This one-day, interactive choral conference is being convened in the Department of Music at the University of Sheffield, with funding from The Institute of Musical Research. The aim of the event is to provide a forum for Early Career Researchers to present their work on choral practice, performance and pedagogy, and to demonstrate the impact of current research in a way which emphasizes practical applications alongside pedagogical approaches to choral rehearsal and performance.

Early Career Researchers are invited to submit proposals for sessions with a strong participative element. Sessions may take the form of practical demonstrations, masterclasses, performances or workshops (45 minutes maximum), which are related to the presenter's original research, or which interrogate choral concepts and philosophies derived from the researcher's review of the literature. Subjects may include choral training, choral leadership, group dynamics in the choral context, performance practices, rehearsal strategies, choral repertoire, choral inclusion and diversity, and topics related to community singing or choral learning processes.

Shorter spoken papers (20 minutes, including 5 minutes for questions) are also invited, preferably including a practical, participative or performance element. Subjects for roundtable discussions or panels (30 minutes maximum) may also be suggested, with the aim of sharing knowledge, experience, research findings and potential applications amongst participants. Presentations, demonstrations and workshops may be related to research on group singing in any context, and to any type or size of choral ensemble. A repertoire exchange will be included in the programme, so delegates will be encouraged to bring a song or vocal warm up to share.

The format and content of this conference is designed to attract a wide range of delegates, including Early Career Researchers, graduate students, senior scholars and practitioners (such as conductors, singers and singing teachers) who work in the related fields of choral singing and community music. It will provide a rare opportunity to bring together a diverse range of delegates, presenters and performers, in order to make connections between choral research and choral practice and performance in the community. The format of the event is intended to ensure a high level of audience engagement, and to provide opportunities for networking and knowledge exchange, which will be focused upon practical, participative and pedagogical applications of choral research.

Bursaries for Early Career Researchers: There will be a limited number of travel bursaries, funded by the Institute of Musical Research, to assist ECRs to present their work at this conference. Applications for bursaries are encouraged from ECRs who are within three years of completing their PhD, and who do not hold an academic post which provides access to conference funding.

Bursary applications should include:

•          A note of the applicant's PhD completion date

•          Confirmation that the applicant does not currently have access to funding for conference attendance

•          An accurate indication of the travel costs that will be involved in attending this conference

•          A short biography (c. 200 words)

Submissions: Please send abstracts (c. 300 words) along with applications for travel bursaries to Dr Michael Bonshor: m.bonshor@sheffield.ac.uk.

The closing date for submissions and bursary applications is January 15th 2016. All proposals should include the name and email address of the presenter, and details of any AV requirements for the session.