There’ll be “hands-on demonstrations, music, comedy, dancing and art”, and: “Food and drinks are available throughout, just drop in at any time.”

I’ve been involved in research on the DarwinTunes evolutionary music generator with some Bob MacCallum and Armand Leroi from Imperial College, and they’re presenting a live version on the Saturday.

I’m definitely going on Saturday, so would be great to see you all there.

The Speaker opened the event, and though the event didn’t take place in the famous House of Commons, it was certainly quite interesting to get a glimpse of parliamentary life. As laid out in the brief, the minister was not the only person we could ask; rather there were three sessions, with the current minister (and the Chief Scientific Advisor), with the Science and Technology Committee, and finally with the shadow Minister for Universities and Science.

The overall greatest interest seemed to evolve around genetic engineering and stem cell research, both contentious subjects; dear to scientists, but not necessarily to the general public. In the answers of the politicians it became clear that the main problem really is the discrepancy between public opinion and science. Essentially, politicians need to balance the interests of science with those of the public they represent. So conscientious politicians will strive to educate their voters about what they they think is the scientifically best solution to a problem because they cannot consistently ignore public opinion, not even in favour of conflicting scientific facts.

It is these more fundamental things that I think I’ve learned, not many answers that actually change my day-to-day work flow. Maybe more could have been learned if the scientists asking had been more aggressive—but that needs practice. The prime minister’s question time certainly is a different kettle of fish. One other oddity in the event I went to was that the individual funding bodies’ representatives asked questions selected by the organisers from a question pool. So they did not necessarily ask their own questions—this happened to Andrew. These factors made the event a little tame But, in summary, it was a good experience, and a great move of the Biological Society to organise this, and of course of the MPs to spend time with scientists.

Yesterday it was a pleasure to see Bas de Haas (check out his mafioso photo) get his PhD in a public defense ceremony that was quite different to my own (which was two people asking me about my thesis for about two hours in a small meeting room at Queen Mary): audience, jury and the candidate convened in a grand hall clad with paintings of (I assume) the old greats of Utrecht scholarship. The opponents, clad in robes and wearing hats, had the duty to probe the candidate’s knowledge — but in a kind of non-physical show wrestling style, i.e. they were joking, and Bas’s responses seemed (I couldn’t actually understand them) to aim at providing a good show to the audience rather than making a compelling argument. That’s because (unlike in the UK) the serious review and revision happens months before the defense. In any case, very interesting, and well done Bas!

Today was the day of the actual symposium, and luckily that was all in English. Much easier, though the talks on grammars and syntax of harmony by Bas, José Pedro Magalhães and Martin Rohrmeier that started the day off were still a bit hard to deeply understand — will have to read up on it in Bas’s thesis.
Meinard Müller gave some nice insights into chord labelling performance as a factor of different kinds of preprocessing and processing steps, whitening, smoothing over time, and different inference techniques, especially HMM vs simple chord pattern. (The main theme of Meinard’s talk, which was the cross-version chord display, which I already knew plenty about.)

I also quite liked Aline Honing’s talk on extracting low-level interval characteristics from MIDI, which (after multi-dimensional scaling — sorry for the scary word!) appeared to cluster pieces from different classical periods together nicely, though it remains to be seen how that qualitatively differs from existing algorithms in Humdrum and other symbolic processing toolboxes. Xavier Serra talked about his exciting multi-cultural project CompMusic, and it really made sense to me today: there is really a lot to be learned by stepping out of our own culture, to find that the methods we thought worked do not generally work. I expect lots of colourful new MIR to come our way from Barcelona soon! Similarly Anja Volk presented her new Musiva project on similarity and variation — I’m looking forward to the slides, because she had some really nice citations from the cognitive science literature and beyond.

Thanks to my collaborations I have a lot of juicy stuff to talk about:

• the SongPrompter application I did at AIST with Hiromasa Fujihara and Masataka Goto,
• the amazing Songle.jp web service, a big project at AIST to which I contributed chord, key and beat/bar estimates
• and Last.fm’s Driver’s Seat, a collaboration with Mark Levy and Sven Over

already span quite a wide range of MIR applications, and I will also show a bit of Yanno, Dan Stowell’s education project based on YouTube and my Chordino Vamp plugin. Two things link these applications:

1. they very closely involve human interaction, some for music making, some for song browsing, some for music discovery in collections
2. they integrate many MIR techniques into one multi-faceted application

And, of course, they all involve harmony. SongPrompter combines lyrics and chord alignment based on MFCC and chroma features, chords are a central part of Yanno and Songle, too. In Last.fm’s Driver’s Seat the connection is not as obvious, but some of its most enjoyable (to me) features are the search for harmonic creativity (based on my the Structural Change feature), for gear shifts, or simply harmonic smoothness.

So I’m looking forwards a lot – check back for my final slides. [Edit: the slides, including references, are now here.]