Anja Volk, Professor of Music Information Computing, has a dual background in mathematics and musicology which she applies to cross-disciplinary approaches at the intersection of computer science and music. She has an international reputation in the areas of music information retrieval (MIR), computational musicology and music cognition, mathematical music theory and music technology for health and wellbeing. Her work has helped bridge the gap between scientific and humanistic approaches while working in interdisciplinary research teams in Germany (1999-2003), the USA (2003-2005) and the Netherlands (since 2006). In 2010 she has been awarded a highly prestigious NWO-VIDI grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, which allowed her to start her own research group at the intersection of MIR, musicology and cognition. Her research aims at enhancing our understanding of music as a fundamental human trait while applying these insights for developing music technologies that offer new ways of interacting with music, including music-driven serious games. She is currently co-editing a special issue on "Explaining music with AI: Advancing the scientific understanding of music through computation" in the open-access journal Music & Science.
Anja has given numerous invited talks worldwide and held editorships in leading journals, including the Journal of New Music Research and Musicae Scientiae. She has co-founded several international initiatives, most notably the International Society for Mathematics and Computation in Music (SMCM); the flagship journal of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (TISMIR), for which she serves as Editor-in-Chief and coordinated a Special Issue on AI and Musical Creativity; and the Women in MIR (WIMIR) mentoring program, which organizes yearly mentoring rounds with participants from academia and industry spanning all continents, in order to foster greater diversity in MIR. Anja’s commitment to diversity and inclusion was recognized with the Westerdijk Award in 2018 from Utrecht University, and as a co-founder and steering committee member of the Women in Information and Computing Sciences (WICS) network with Utrecht University's Diversity and Inclusion Award 2020.
She is also committed to connecting different research communities and providing interdisciplinary education for the next generation through the organization of international workshops, such as the Lorentz Center in Leiden workshops Music similariy: concepts, cognition, and computation (2015), Computational Ethnomusicology: Methodologies for a New Field (2017) and Music, Computing and Health (2019). Teaching the master course "Sound and Music Technology" has led to collaborations with students on topics such as music generation and AI, with contributions to the international AI Song Contest in 2020 (Abbus) and 2021 (A glitch in humanity), and diversity in musical playlists, featured by NPO Radio 1 on December 24, 2021.