LoCoMus Webinars

In the academic year of 2024-2025, LoCoMus is bringing you one webinar every month to get to know the players and topics of the network.

Upcoming Webinars:

Webinar April: 25th of April, 11am

April's webinar will focus on the research conducted at PXL-Music in Hasselt, Belgium (https://www.pxl.be/departementen/pxl-music/). Brecht De Man, Head of Research, and colleagues will present the group and its current and recent projects. Zooming in on one project from each of the themes – Immersive Music and Sound Education – gives a sense of the type of practice-based music technology research that happens at this center of expertise and the potential avenues for collaboration. 

Webinar May: 23rd of May, 11am

For this webinar, there will be two speakers focusing on music recommendation systems: Karlijn Dinnissen and Paul Raingeard de la Blétière.

Karlijn Dinnissen (Universiteit Utrecht)

Incorporating Artist Values into Music Recommender Systems and Streaming Platforms

This talk presents findings from two studies on music recommender systems, focusing on the perspectives of artists and other professionals working in the music industry. Semi-structured interviews with artists reveal a strong desire for greater transparency and fairness, alongside a need for more control over recommendations of artists’ own music. A survey conducted with industry professionals highlights similar concerns, emphasizing the role of streaming services in their work and the importance of recommendation diversity. Combining these perspectives, we close by exploring how the identified desires could potentially align with user satisfaction, to improve music streaming platforms for all stakeholders.

Paul Raingeard de la Blétière (TU Delft/ Universiteit Leiden)

A Music Recommendation System for Constructed Music-Evoked Episodic Memories (CMEEMs)

Based on previous literature on Music-evoked autobiographical memories, we introduce Constructed Music-Evoked Episodic Memories (CMEEMs), a framework linking chosen episodic memories to music. By creating a personalized song-memory database, CMEEMs enable autonomous mood regulation and communication in People with Dementia (PwD) interacting with social robots, integrating memory cues—such as people and places—alongside mood congruence, to help choose songs with high mood regulatory impact. Based on the evaluations of song recommendations based on personal positive memories, factors that are important in recommending songs that match the memory are identified, especially highlighting familiarity and genre.

Past Webinars:

Webinar February 

The third webinar of this series will involve not one but three speakers: Melissa Bremmer from the Amsterdam University of Arts and Luc Nijs & Bahareh Behzadaval from the University of Luxembourg. They will discuss "Research in music education: embodiment, technology and disability" on the 21st of February at 11h. Please register to receive the zoom link for this webinar.

Webinar January

For our second webinar, we will welcome Christoph Finkensiep, assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam, will be giving a talk entitled "Beyond Voices - A New Take on Polyphonic Structure in Western Tonal Music". Please register to receive the zoom link for this webinar. 

Talk abstract: Voice leading is usually taken as one of the core principles of Western tonal music. However, simple models of voices as sequences of notes don't really capture the relevant note-to-note relations in music. In this webinar, we are going to look at voice-leading phenomena in different textures, from monophonic melodies to free polyphony, and identify common principles. From these principles, a model of voice leading is developed that replaces the notion of "voice" with a more general type of structure. This "protovoice" model does not just capture note-to-note relations but can also explain higher-level structures such as harmony and schemata. To round off the webinar, we are going to reflect on the role of modeling and operationalization in computational and cognitive research.  

Webinar November

For the first webinar, we will welcome Alan Bince Jacob on the 22nd of November at 11am. Alan is a PhD candidate from the university of Maastricht and will tell us more about ‘Predictive Coding in Parkinsonian Gait: Studying Neural Control of Movement in Acoustic and Augmented-Reality Cueing’. Please register to receive the zoom link for this webinar. We will start with a brief introduction about the lab at Maastricht and there will be time to ask questions and discuss after the talk.