Music Information Computing Projects

AlgoRhythm - Developing a rhythm game for ameliorating sensory processing deficits of children.

We develop and evaluate a serious rhythm game for detecting and ameliorating sensory processing issues of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Pilot studies indicate that therapeutic interventions based on musical rhythms can improve planning and execution strategies, but also improve childrens' social skills. This is a Dynamics-of-Youth project carried out in collaboration with the University Medical Center Utrecht and Leiden University,  which brings together experts in music information computing, psychiatry, music therapy, game design, data science, learning technology, and neuroscience.

Find more information on this website or contact Anja Volk.

Cantostream - Computational analysis of tonal structures in early music

CANTOSTREAM is a corpus-based computational study of music composed between 1400 and 1750. During the 16th and 17th centuries a transition took place from modality, with its emphasis on melodic structures, to harmonic tonality governed by chord progressions. Our research focusses on the quantitative elements that characterise this transition.

Our main activities are:

  • Measure human perception of musical boundaries
  • Analyse the tonal patterns around these boundaries
  • Build representative samples for a corpus study of 10.000 recordings
  • Analyse music audio files with music processing techniques

If you are a UU-student and you want to collaborate, you can find more information about this project on our Konjoin project page. If you are from outside the UU, you can send a message to m.e.visscher@uu.nl or f.wiering@uu.nl.

Automatic Discovery of Patterns in Music

Musical pattern discovery algorithms have been researched for several decades in Music Information Retrieval. This project contributes to the comparisons between musical pattern discovery mechanisms by

  • Developing digital interfaces for collecting human annotations of musical patterns
  • Introducing new methods for the comparison between humanly and automatically discovered musical patterns
  • Implementing Pattrans in Haskell for comparing musical pattern occurrences through musical transformations
  • Comparing musical pattern discovery algorithms employing transformations between pattern occurrences.

This project is a collaboration between the Music Information Computing and Software Technology groups. For more information please contact Iris Ren or Anja Volk.

Bongo Beats - Tap with Me

Visually impaired children face many barriers in our society, and when it comes to social engagement, they engage less in cooperative play compared to sighted children. This project investigates music-based collaborative multiplayer computer games as a tool to encourage children to develop their social skills. Our game “Bongo Beats: Tap With Me” uses musical interactions to encourage inclusive play between visually impaired children and their sighted peers. Challenges for the game design include the quantity and quality of feedback which is necessary for the players, implementing adaptive difficulty to ensure the game is engaging for players of any skill level, and employing music information retrieval methods to extract beat information that aligns with perceptual qualities of the music. We collaborate with experts in the field of visual impairment, such as with the Bartimeus Foundation and Visio. For more information contact Anja Volk.