Research
Talk at Cultural Evolution Society 2022
I gave a talk titled “Studying the evolution of pop music across 55 countries since the 1950s” in Aarhus, Denmark at the bi-yearly conference held by the Cultural Evolution Society. I discuss preliminary findings about acoustic properties and lyrics of pop songs around the world from yet to be released GlobalPOP dataset.
Presentation recording
Without a Song or a Dance What are We?
As part of the “A night of Music, Performance & Neuroscience” to end the Brain Awareness week, I presented a talk at the Hitness club, Leipzig. The talk was about the diversity of music around the world, the hidden mathematical beauty that underlies the resonance of tones, and our unique ability as humans to synchronously move with one another (e.g., boogie together) in large scale.
Timbre Perception Test (TPT) included in Long-Gold Project
The LongGold project is a longitudinal research study investigating the development of musical abilities across the teenage years. The project aims to understand what role music plays in the development of secondary school students. It documents how musical skills are related to cognitive abilities, attitudes, personality, psycho-social skills, and academic performance. The Timbre Perception Test (TPT) is now included as one of the test in the test battery of LongGold for measuring individual’s ability to discriminate between timbre. You can try the demo version of the TPT online here.
Paper published in ISMIR 2021
We tested whether Americans, Brazilians and South Koreans perceive the same or different moods in the music that is local or foreign to them. We then compared these ratings with current state-of-the-art machine estimates to examine whether the automatica mood detection algorithms are systematically biased to the US (given most training data are English songs).
*nominated for best student paper
Talk at ICMPC-ESCOM 2021
I presented about the formation of a new database called globalPOP, which I extensively gathered representative pop music samples around the world along with various metadata, machine retrieved features, and lyrics. Some preliminary results are also discussed.
Presentation recording
*nominated for best student paper
Talk at CIM19
I introduced the Timbre Perception Test (TPT), a new psychoacoustic test for measuring individual differences in the ability to hear fine-grained variations along three dimensions of timbre space. For more details watch the recorded talk, read the paper, or try out the test yourself.
update: there is now an R package, tptT which is built using the psychTestR and runs locally using R.