[Accessible Musical Instrument] [2023] [Hopefully NIME]

Inspired by chessboards, the Xbox adaptive controller, and sturdy fridge magnets, we developed a (more) physically accessible drum machine that uses capacitive sensors, 3D-printed jello-filled chess pieces, and magnets to create the sequence. This was a collaboration with Oakland-based poet, academic, and Mortal Kombat wizard Lateef McLeod.

[Music Neuroscience] [2022] [Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience]

We demonstrate neural decoding of imagined and heard musical pitch class from fMRI measurements. Our results extend previous findings by decoding specific patterns of brain-activity across multiple regions that discriminate pitch classes, both heard and imagined. Additionally, a model trained solely on heard pitch class successfully classified imagined pitch class, indicating strong representational overlap between heard and imagined pitch structures. This work deepens our understanding of auditory cognition and volitional control of executive function.

I also contributed a book chapter on this work in Sounds from Within: Phenomenology and Practice

[Voice Science] [2023] [IEEE Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG) Conference] 

We explored the concept of "Persona" in the voice through a qualitative interview study with singers, actors, linguistics, screen reader, and text-to-speech (AAC) users. Through this deeper understanding of persona, the "Context, Perception, Production" model, we were able to make design recommendations on how might we design more expressive and responsive text-to-speech systems. This project was a collaboration with the wonderful Camille Noufi.

Pre-print is available here.
Some more papers about this are available here and (hopefully someday soon) here.

[Accessible Musical Instrument] [2023] [New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) Conference]

A collaboration with musician Peter Larsson where we investigated some of the creative possibilities for physically inclusive musical performance that a state-of-the-art nerve sensor would afford. We focused primarily on the gestural control of digital musical instruments. This work was performed in collaboration with Peter Larson and ShareMusic Sweden.

[Acoustic Synthesis] [2019] [New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) Conference]

BLIKSEM is a novel fuzz pedal effect that uses a cantilever and soundboard to generate distortion and other dynamic audio effects.  

A bonus 2017 paper detailing the theory behind it is available here.

[Art book] [2019] [It is still sitting on my desk and I'm nervous to do anything else with it]

Or "Kanye In A Room" is a recursively generated lyric 500-page, guilded art book. Inspired by Alvin Lucier’s “I’m Sitting In A Room”, the work addresses themes of representations of the self as well as the generative and essentializing role AI plays in creative technology.

[Music Theory] [2019] [Rhythm in Music Since 1900 Conference]

Burial, is a critically acclaimed UK electronic musician known for his unusual rhythms. He created his Mercury Prize-nominated album Untrue in Sound Forge 5, an audio editing software with extremely limited functionality, notably the lack of a quantization feature. Through a micro-timing analysis of Burial’s 2007 track “Archangel”, I show that the placement of certain elements off of the conventional metric aid in establishing his unique rhythms. Specifically, the jittered elements cause glitch stutters as well as a perceived rushing of implied space.

[Music Information Retrival] [2019] [European Machine Learning PKDD Conference]

The efficacy of familiarity as a feature in a music emotion recognition (MER) system was evaluated by a Random Forest feature importance analysis on a novel dataset of 5000 clips with annotated familiarity and valence. Familiarity was correlated to perceived valence (r=0.250) and resulted in a statistically significant increase of 0.011 in the F-score of a baseline MER classifier upon its inclusion. 

[Biomedical Data Science] [2021] [Nature Scientific Reports]

I worked in Jane Hill's infectious disease lab for 4 years during my undergrad. My senior honors thesis explored how we might use breath samples to more quickly diagnose tuberculosis (TB) in children.