Last week I attended a workshop on Music Similarity (Concepts, cognition and computation) held at the Lorentz Center (International Center for Workshops in the Sciences) in Leiden, Netherlands. The Lorentz Center is an international center that coordinates and hosts workshops in the sciences, based on the philosophy that science thrives on interaction between creative researchers. Lorentz Center workshops focus on new collaborations and interactions between scientists from different countries and fields, and with varying seniority.
As a contrast from the photo showed on their web, only female researchers working in music from different perspectives organized this workshop, which is already noticeable in our field:
- Christina Anagnostopoulou (Athens, Greece) – computational music analysis
- Elaine Chew (London, United Kingdom) – mathematics & music, performance
- Elizabeth Margulis (Fayetteville, USA) – music cognition
- Anja Volk (Utrecht, The Netherlands) – computation & musicology
They represent the different disciplines covered in the workshop:
- Conceptual and computational aspects in music similarity
- Music similarity and cognition
- Music similarity in practice
The program was a combination of plenary presentation of different topics, discussion sessions in small groups and large groups, long breaks for lunch, coffee combined with interaction among participants, and nice social activities.
I enjoyed a lot this event, as it was a nice mixture of colleagues I already knew, researchers I had read their work but not met personally and new students with fresh ideas.
I focused my presentation on the applications of music similarity measures in Music Information Retrieval and the challenges of “building real applications for real people”. You can find my slides here:
And some photos here:
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- Music similarity: list of topics
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- My wonderful office at Lorentz Center
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- One of the sessions
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- Group photo (I had already left!!!)
Emilia Gómez: personal website 