George Tzanetakis, from University of Victoria, will give a seminar about "Computational Ethnomusicology - Expanding the reach of Music Information Retrieval to the musics of the world" on Monday June 29th 2009 at 3pm in room 52.210,

Abstract: Music Information Retrieval (MIR) is a relatively new research area in multimedia. MIR deals with the analysis and retrieval of music in digital form. It reflects the tremendous recent growth of music-related data digitally available and the consequent need to search within it to retrieve music and musical information efficiently and effectively. Most of existing work in MIR has focused on western classical and popular music as these types of music have the largest commercial interest. In this talk I will describe two case studies in Computational Ethnomusicology that explores how MIR techniques can be applied to the study of non-Western music for which there is no standardized written reference (which is a large percentage of the music of world if not of album sales). The first case study is an automatic analysis of micro-timing in complex Afro-Cuban percussion music using rotation-aware dynamic programming. The second case study is a content and context aware web visualization interface for the study of religious chant. In addition to the technical challenges these projects presented I will also discuss the social challenges of Interdisciplinary collaborations between engineering and humanities.

George Tzanetakis website