Greetings! I am a PhD student at USC currently doing research on the perception of musical structure. I'll be re-starting my PhD this September at Queen Mary, University of London (earning a MSc. from USC for my troubles).
Links are on the left: to learn more about my academic life, click towards the top; to really get to know me as a person, click towards the bottom.
New for April 2012: added some old coursework under the "Coursework" item.
I'm from Montréal. I started going to school when I was 6 years old. I became addicted and haven't been able to quit since.
At Harvard I did a joint degree in Music and Physics, and although these interests mostly remained separate, I wound up loving the more mathematical, quantitative research on music I did for my thesis. At McGill, I followed the lead to Ichiro Fujinaga's lab and the new world of Music Information Retrieval. I completed a Master's there and helped develop a big database of structural annotations called, ingeniously, SALAMI.
I started a PhD at University of Southern California with Elaine Chew in Fall 2010, but she started a new post at Queen Mary the following year. Although I passed my screening exam in Fall 2011, I will be rejoining Prof. Chew in London in Fall 2012 to finish my PhD. I plan to study the cues and methods that listeners use to interpret the large-scale structure of pieces of music.
Articles and conference papers:
- Smith, J. B. L., J. A. Burgoyne, I. Fujinaga, D. De Roure and J. S. Downie. 2011. Design and creation of a large-scale database of structural annotations. Accepted for publication in Proceedings of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference. PDF, BIB
- Bay, M., J. A. Burgoyne, T. Crawford, D. De Roure, J. S. Downie, A. Ehmann, B. Fields, I. Fujinaga, K. Page and J. B. L. Smith. 2011. Towards web-scale computational musicology: An update on the SALAMI project. In Proceedings of the 10th UK e-Science All Hands Meeting. York, England. PDF, BIB
- Schankler, I., J. B. L. Smith, A François and E. Chew. 2011. Emergent formal structures of factor oracle-driven musical improvisations. In Mathematics and Computation in Music, eds. C. Agon, M. Andreatta, G. Assayag, E. Amiot, J. Bresson and J. Mandereau. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 6726, 241–54. PDF, BIB
- McKay, C., J. A. Burgoyne, J. Hockman, J. B. L. Smith, G. Vigliensoni, and I. Fujinaga. 2010. Evaluating the genre classification performance of lyrical features relative to audio, symbolic and cultural features. In Proceedings of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference. 213–8. PDF, BIB
- Li, B., J. B. L. Smith and I. Fujinaga. 2009. Optical audio reconstruction for stereo phonograph records using white light interferometry. In Proceedings of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference. 627–32. PDF, BIB
Theses:
- Smith, Jordan B. L. 2010. An evaluation and comparison of approaches to the automatic formal analysis of musical audio. Master's thesis, McGill University, Montréal, QC, Canada. PDF, BIB, website.
- Smith, Jordan B. L. 2006. Testing Zipf's Law: The Mathematics and Aesthetics of Performance. Bachelor's thesis, Harvard College, Cambridge, MA. PDF
A list of some conferences I've attended:
- Oct. 24–28, 2011
- The 12th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference. Miami, FL.
- Aug. 11–14, 2011
- The biennial meeting of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition. Rochester, NY.
- June 15–17, 2011
- International Conference on Mathematics and Computation in Music (MCM 2011). Paris, France.
- Nov. 4–7, 2010
- AMS/SMT 2010 Annual Meeting. Indianapolis, IN.
- Oct. 9, 2010
- Out To Innovate Summit. USC, Los Angeles, CA.
- Oct. 7–8, 2010
- National Grand Challenges Summit for the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). USC, Los Angeles, CA.
- April 30–May 1, 2010
- ROFLcon 2. Boston, MA.
- March 26, 2010
- Workshop on Structural Analysis of Music. McGill University, Montreal, QC.
- Jan. 29, 2010
- North East Music Informatics Special Interest Group. NYU, New York, NY.
- Nov. 21–22, 2009
- Music Hack Day. Boston, MA.
- Oct. 31, 2009
- CrestMuse Workshop. Kyoto, Japan.
- Oct. 26–30, 2009
- The 10th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference. Kobe, Japan.
- Aug. 16–21, 2009
- International Computer Music Conference. McGill University, Montreal, QC.
- June 19–22, 2009
- International Conference on Mathematics and Computation in Music. Yale University, New Haven, CT.
- May 12, 2009
- Workshop on Expressive Performance. Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC.
- Nov. 14, 2008
- Workshop on Music and Machine Learning. Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC.
- Sept. 14–18, 2008
- The 9th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference. Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA.
- April 25–26, 2008
- ROFLcon. MIT, Boston, MA.
Most of what's in a resume is already in other parts of the page—namely, education, publications, projects and conferences—but you can find the rest of the relevant information here. Or you could download a PDF of my resume.
Languages I understand:
- CSS, English, fluent in French, HTML, very little Japanese, LaTeX/BibTeX, MATLAB, Max/MSP, MIDI, Pd (Pure Data), Python, Ruby, Western Music Notation.
Awards:
- Oct. 2011
- Graduate School Travel Award. University of Southern California award for travel for conferences. $500.
- Aug. 2010
- Provost's Ph.D. Fellowship. University of Southern California award for graduate students. $30,000 for 4 years.
- May 2010
- Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture (FQRSC). Provincial grant to support Master’s research. $15,000.
- Oct. 2009
- Alma Mater Travel Grant. McGill award to support travel costs for presenting work at the International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference in Kobe, Japan. $750.
- May 2009
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Federal grant to support Master’s research. $17,500.
- Sept. 2008
- Provost’s Graduate Fellowship. McGill award to finance graduate studies. $1,500.
- June 2006
- David McCord prize. Awarded to graduating students of Harvard “who have shown unusual creative talent in writing, drama, music, painting, drawing or sculpture.”
Work Experience:
- Feb. 2010–Aug. 2010
- Researcher for Structural Analysis of Large Amounts of Music Information (SALAMI) project. Responsible for coordinating ground truth collection and assembling analysis algorithms.
- Jan. 2008–Aug. 2010
- Private tutor. Individual instruction in high school- and CÉGEP-level math, chemistry and physics.
- May 2009–Oct. 2009
- Web designer for cirmmt.mcgill.ca. Designed and built new site template, including custom modules, for integration with updated Plone framework.
- Sept. 2008–April 2009
- Teaching assistant for McGill University. Spring: MUTH 111 (Harmony and Analysis, with Prof. Carmen Sabourin). Fall: MUTH 110 (Melody and Counterpoint, with Prof. Jonathan Wild). Taught twice-weekly small sections and met individually with students. Guest lecturer for Prof. Wild.
- July 2008–April 2009
- Assistant web developer for improvcommunity.ca. Responsible for general site management and for planning and creating certain site areas, such as the help area, student forums, and dynamic conference schedule, within Drupal framework.
- May 2008–June 2008
- Note Tracker for Electronic Arts Montréal. Transcribed melody information in MIDI format for proprietary interpreter.
Other nice things:
- Thirteen years of classical piano training.
- Invited speaker at Westmount High School 2006 graduation ceremonies.
Final project:
- Toward segmenting audio with multi-scale information. The goal was to explore whether automatic segmentation of pieces of music could be improved by integrating information about the novelty of the piece at multiple time scales. No improvement over a baseline reported in other research was found, so a more clever approach to integrating the information needs to be found. Alternatively, it could be that the hierarchical structure I hoped to take advantage of can only be properly accessed or modelled once a more abstract version of the signal is obtained (i.e., after you have moved a few more steps beyond the low-level signal representation).
- Presentation on automatic segmentation (ZIP of Keynote file)
- Project report (PDF. Please ignore the ISMIR copyright statement; using the ISMIR template was part of the assignment and the manuscript was not submitted.)
Final project:
- Digital Rainstick. Mike Collicutt and I produced matching rainstick simulators: his was a physical controller that used silent beads and synthetic sounds; mine was a Pd patch that allowed a haptic controller to interact with a DIMPLE object, and used STK (via ChucK!) to turn collisions into synthetic sounds. (Whew!) Basically, it meant you could move one end of a virtual rainstick around in space and hear the results. You can watch our very informal oral presentation on YouTube (part 1 and part 2) and download the patch.
Homework:
Final paper:
- Literature review on authorship attribution, an area of study in text retrieval (DOC)
Presentations:
Lesson learned: never try to preserve presentations in Powerpoint or Keynote format; always keep a PDF on hand for posterity. (The PPTs above may or may not resemble the design of the presentations as given.)
Final project:
Final project:
I enjoy creating cryptic crossword puzzles and other variety puzzles.
I recently had the honour of helping to write the 2012 MIT Mystery Hunt. I contributed 3 puzzles (and had a helping hand in putting together 3 more). The puzzle I'm most proud of is Yo Dawg, I Herd You Like Puzzle Hunts—don't peek at the answer for it without trying it first!
I previously helped write the meta puzzle for and contributed a couple puzzles to the 2006 Harvard Puzzle Hunt.
At Harvard I also occasionally contributed a puzzle feature to the Harvard Independent. The Indy doesn't maintain an online archive, so you can't find these yet.