News Update

Posted by cmotuz on March 19, 2012

First of all, the whole lab congratulates Dr. John Ashley Burgoyne, who has now officially received his Ph.D. title. Ashley is getting ready to move to the Netherlands in June to start a Post-Doctoral position at the University of Amsterdam to study what makes tunes stick in our ears. We also congratulate Remi Chiu, the senior musicologist on the SIMSSA project, who will head into his thesis defence next week having just accepted a position for next academic year at Loyola University in Baltimore, Maryland. Bravo to both and all the best with future endeavours. The lab also bid a fond farewell to Mathieu Bergeron this week, who just finished his post-doctoral position with us and will stay in Montreal and continue to work on his own projects.

The lab is abuzz with preparing paper proposals for the ISMIR 2012 conference, to be held in Porto this October. Jason has just returned from some collaborative work on beat recognition in Porto, and his stories about the lovely food and weather are giving us all an extra bit of inspiration. In the meantime, Andrew Hankinson’s attached paper outlining the steps for performing optical music recognition on the Liber Usualis has been accepted for the AdMIRe 2012 conference in Lyons in just under a month’s time. Being over in France will allow both Andrew and Prof. Ichiro Fujinaga to head from there to Beirut, Lebanon where they will revisit the IRAB/McGill Arabic Music Database that this lab was involved in setting up in 2008.

In other news, we have now received very high quality digital photos of the Salzinnes antiphonal. We will continue to perform OMR on the medium quality version, but these photos will allow us to test the compatibility of recognition between different file sizes as well as give diva.js, our image viewer the challenge of displaying images very quickly. There will be more news about diva next week as both Wendy and Andrew continue to polish extensions and improvements which will make it easier for other projects to use the viewer to display their own documents.