15 Sept 2016 - David Bainbridge: Seminar

TITLE:

Mozart's Laptop: Utilising Music Information Retrieval to Enhance Creativity

ABSTRACT:

If Mozart were alive today, what sorts of musical apps would such an innovative composer use on his laptop? In this seminar I will attempt to answer—at least in part—this question. We will metaphorically drop in on Wolfgang composing at home in the morning, at an orchestra rehearsal in the afternoon, and find him unwinding in the evening  playing a spot of the new game Piano Hero which is (in my fictional narrative) all the rage in the Viennese coffee shops!  From a pedagogical perspective, these three scenarios are chosen because they cover the main forms of digital music representation: audio, sheet music, and symbolic notation.  In each case I will demonstrate a software prototype that draws upon music information retrieval and digital music library research to provide novel forms of access and management of musical digital content.

BIOGRAPHY:

David Bainbridge is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Waikato, and Director of the New Zealand Digital Library Research Project.  He is an advocate of open source software, and an active coder on the Greenstone digital library project, and the spatial hypermedia system, Expeditee.  His research interests include music content analysis, and human computer interaction in addition to digital libraries. He has published widely in these areas, including the book How to Build a Digital Library, with colleagues Prof. Ian Witten and Dr. Dave Nichols, now into its second edition.  David graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science from Edinburgh University, UK as the class medalist, and undertook his PhD in Computer Science at Canterbury University, New Zealand in the area of Optical Music Recognition as a Commonwealth Scholar.