In 2014 I defended my PhD thesis, Compose=Compute - Computer Generation And Classification Of Music Through Operations Research Methods, at the Unviversity of Antwerp under the supervision of Prof. dr. Kenneth Sörensen. In the research, I have developed automatic music generation systems using metaheuristic optimization techniques, combined with rules and machine learning. Other topics included composer classification, and Android app that generates music in the style of a chosen (or mixed) composer's style, and an app that does dance hit prediction based on an audio file.

This week, I'm in San Francisco for the ICMPC conference. There are many interesting topics addressed in this bi-annual conference on music perception and cognition, including cognitive models of music and Music & health. My talk presented the model for tonal tension and the resulting music generation system MorpheuS that I have developed together with Elaine Chew at the Centre for Digital Music in London.

Today I gave a talk at TENOR, The Second International Conference on Technologies for Music Notation and Representation in Cambridge (UK). There were many interesting session on the latest music represenatation technologies. My presentation focused on the tonal tension model, which I have developed together with Elaine Chew, and how this is implemented in the polyphonic music generation algorithm called MorpheuS.

I will be in Paris next week to give an invited seminar on the MorpheuS music generation project at l'institut de recherche et coordination accoustique/musique (IRCAM) in Paris. Read the full announcement on Ircam's website

Title: Morphing Music According to a Long-term Tension Profile and Detected Patterns

When: Wednesday 20th April, 2016 at 12h
Where: Ircam, salle Stravinsky

I'll be giving a talk on "Music generation with structural constraints: an operations research approach" at ORBEL30, the national conference of the SOGESCI-BVWB, the Belgian Operational Research (OR) Society, Member of EURO, the association of European OR Societies, and Belgian representative of IFORS (International Federation of OR Societies). The conference is hosted by the Catholic University of Leuven (UCL) at Louvain-la-Neuve on January 27th and 28th.

I'll be giving a seminar for PhD students at the Department of Computer Science (Research Group SCALAB) of the University Carlos III de Madrid next Friday. The topic will be on how to combine music and operations research. From their website:

Title: Music and operations research: applications in automatic generation music and dance hit prediction.

Presenter: Dorien Herremans (Queen Mary University)

I'll be giving a talk on generating structured music with local search optimisation and machine learning. The seminar is organised by the Department of Computing, at Imperial College London and will take place on the 14th of October at 15:30.

Seminar talk
Department of Computing, Imperial College London

Generating structured music with local search optimisation and machine learning
Dorien Herremans, PhD (MSCA Fellow) Queen Mary University of London

On my way through Southern California, I was invited by Prof. Robert Keller, who works on the impro-visor, to give a talk at Harvey-Mudd College in Claremont, CA on July 23rd. The topic of the talk was focused on my Mary-Curie project (MorpheuS): "An automatic composition system for structured music based on optimisation and machine learning".

Yesterday, the ASyMMyS workshop on Audio-Symbolic Music Similarity Modelling was held in the British Library in London. This interesting workshop, organised by Tillman Weyde and Emmanuil Benetos, served to discuss what constitutes music similarity and the current research going on in this field. Dorien Herremans was a member of the discussion panel on "Research Directions and Applications for Music Similarity" together with Emilia Gomez, Bob Sturm and Tilman which was led by Alan Marsden.