Research

A “Rhythmic Contour Map” combining magnitude and phase outputs from the continuous wavelet analysis of a portion of the snare drum rhythm of Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero”.


My research concerns modelling the task of emergent musical rhythm perception. This includes models of syncopation, rhythmic complexity, rhythmic expectancy, similarity, beat tracking, downbeat determination and the use of continuous wavelet transforms for time-frequency representations of musical rhythm.

Background

B.App.Sc (1988) and PG Dip. (1991) in Computing Science from Curtin University of Technology, Western Australia. Ph.D from the University of Western Australia (2001). Industrial software design, development and management in cryptography, communications, signal processing, machine learning, computer music and video analysis systems from 1988 to 2005. From 2005 to 2010 I worked as a post-doctoral researcher with the Music Cognition Group, within the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, Universiteit van Amsterdam, and in the Analysis/Synthesis Group at IRCAM on the Quaero Project, in music information retrieval.

Demonstrations

  • Foot-tapping with Rubato An example of automatic interpretation of a rhythm undergoing extreme asymmetrical rubato (tempo variation).
  • Clapping to Auditory Salience Traces The continuous wavelet transform (CWT) of Morlet and Grossman can also be applied to decompose a rhythm represented by a continuous trace of event “salience” derived directly from the audio signal.

Publications

  • Abstracts and PDFs of my peer reviewed publications

Lecture Slides