Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies

Get to know IACAT post-doc Ben Smith

Ben Smith recently began a post-doc position with the Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies after earning his doctor of musical arts degreefrom the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the spring.

Q. What will you be working on with IACAT?

I’m interested in using dynamic and adaptive machine learning algorithms and models to get a higher level of knowledge about the artistic content of music. Primarily I’ll be researching and developing software.

Ideally, I would like the computer to be able to listen to music the way I, as a trained violinist, listen to music. At the moment, we can get a computer to listen to a melody and break it apart on a surface level—this part repeats, this is transposed, etc. It can track simple patterns like that. But a human will listen to a melody and have an emotional response. So in effect, I want to give the computer access to some sort of emotional understanding, a way of matching the music to what we experience as human listeners.

It begins with looking first at what humans understand about music. Theoretically, as we understand more about how humans listen to music, we’ll be able to produce better and better computer models.

Q. Can you give an example of how this might work?

Take weddings as an example—there are certain classics that get requested at weddings but are rarely heard in other situations because they match that atmosphere, that situation. The computer model might be able to learn what music is likely to correspond to that human situation and offer up predictions, suggestions, and eventually compose and create pieces to fit that situation on demand.

Q. Have you always been interested in the digital and technical side of music, or did you start out interested in more traditional musical experiences?

As a kid, I started out doing Suzuki training for the violin and I also learned to program on our home computer. Then I studied both music and computer science in college, but kept them separate. After graduating I worked as a programmer for a while, and decided to come back to graduate school to bring my music and programming together.

That has been a six-year journey of finding ways to integrate music and computing. I want to find a way to really make music with the computer, so the computer can become a musical partner, or instrument, or tool that can extend my musical creativity and have potentially novel implications for technology development and other fields of research as well.

Q. How do you feel about being part of IACAT? 

Everyone is very supportive, both other researchers in terms of talking about ideas, and the support crew. I feel a very research-supportive atmosphere here.