Together with Prof Ching-Hua Chuan from the University of Miami and Prof. Kat Agres from IHPC, A*STAR, I've just published a new article on 'From Context to Concept: Exploring Semantic Relationships in Music with Word2Vec', in Springer's Neural Computing and Applications (impact factor 4.213). The article describes how we can use word2vec to model complex polyphonic pieces of music using the popular embeddings model. The preprint is available here.

A few months ago, Prof. Gemma Roig (PI, SUTD), Prof. Dorien Herremans (co-PI, SUTD), Dr. Kat Agres (co-PI, A*STAR) and Dr. Eran Gozy (co-PI, MIT, creator of Guitar Hero) got awarded a new grant from the International Design Center (joint research institute of MIT and SUTD) for 'An intelligent system for understanding and matching perceived emotion from video with music'. This is an exiting opportunity and the birth of our new Affective Computing Lab at SUTD that links the computer vision lab and AMAAI lab.

Prof. Lucienne Blessing (co-PI, SUTD), Prof. Lynette Chea (Co-PI, SUTD) and Prof. Takehiko Nagakura (co-PI, MIT) and myself (PI) have just been awarded a grant from the International Design Center (MIT-SUTD). The topic of the grant is to build an Augmented Reality Game to stimulate Climate Change Awareness and support Project P280 within SUTD. The game design will be done by SUTD Game Lab.

I'll be giving an invited talk on Music and AI: Generating Music and More!, coming Friday at the One-North Festival. The one-north Festival is an annual celebration of research, innovation, creativity and enterprise. Jointly organised by the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) and JTC, and supported by Science Centre Singapore, this very exciting event welcomes the public to immerse in science and technology through fun interactive displays, inspiring talks, workshops and tours for the whole family.

I am excited to announce the following job openings for a new SUTD-MIT Project on emotion recognition in video and audio, start date is as soon as possible.

We are seeking a postdoctoral fellow and a research engineer to work on an affective computing research project related to emotion recognition for videos and music. The PIs of the project include Prof. Gemma Roig, Prof. Dorien Herremans, and Dr. Kat Agres. The position is for one year extendable to 2 years.

Today, prof. Wang Ye, general chair of this year's ISMIR, was nice enough to invite me to teach a guest lecture in his Sound and Music Computing class at NUS. The class was introduced by a lecture of Prof. Lonce Wyse, who talked about sound modelling with machine learning. In my talk, we focused on music modelling from a generative perspective. For those interested, you can download my slides here.

In order to bring the music research community in Singapore together, the Music Cognition group at IHPC, A*STAR under the lead of Dr. Kat Agres, organized the first Singaporean Music Research Symposium on Feb. 2nd. With over 70 participants, the day was a true success.

I'm please to announce the latest article I wrote together with Prof. Elaine Chew on MorpheuS, published in IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. The paper explains the inner workings of MorpheuS, a music generation system that is able to generate pieces with a fixed pattern structure and given tension.

Herremans D., Chew E.. 2017. MorpheuS: generating structured music with constrained patterns and tension. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. PP (In Press)(99)

A new journal article was published that I wrote together with Prof. Ching-Hua Chuan and Prof. Elaine Chew. The article is a survey on current music generation systems from a functional point of view, thus creating a nice overview of current challenges and opportunities in the field. The articles covers systems ranging from game music, to real-time improvisation systems and emotional movie music generation systems.