Current News

Ching-Hua Chuan http://www-scf.usc.edu/~chinghuc , a PhD candidate in Computer Science, and member of the Music Computation and Cognition Laboratory, has been awarded one of the three 2007-2008 Digital Dissertation Fellowships. Ching-Hua passed her screening exams with characteristic ease last Spring, and will be taking her qualifying examination in the coming month or two.

Ching-Hua Chuan proposed a digital dissertation project titled "Automatically Generated Style-Specific Musical Accompaniment." In herwords, "This project aims to create a computer-assisted music- makingsystem that takes a user's original melody (input by humming), and automatically creates (by a combination of statistical and knowledge-based methods) sophisticated accompaniment for the melody, in the style of the user's favorite piece or music band."

From the fellowship call: "Graduate School Fellowships in Digital Scholarships are designed to foster multimedia research that expands the potential of academic publication via emergent and transitional media. These fellowships will support students in the production of new scholarship that is based on a thorough rethinking of the dynamic relationship of form to content in academic research.

Fellowship awards will include a 12 month stipend of $24,000, 12 units of tuition for each of the fall and spring semesters, payment of healthand dental insurance and the health center fee. Fellowship funding will cover the year from July 1, 2007 through June 30, 2008."

Another MuCoaCo student, Arpi Mardirossian, is presently a Digital Dissertation Fellow for the 2006-2007 academic year for her project on music similarity and visualization.

The other awardees this year are Sasha Costanza-Chock (Communication,) and Carlos Busso (Electrical Engineering, student of Shri Narayanan.) According to the Graduate School, selections were made based on the merits of the applications, and not the school or departmental affiliations, and this year's three awardees were clearly ahead.