Downie talks with the Boston Globe about music information retrieval

Stephen Downie
J. Stephen Downie, Professor, Interim Executive Associate Dean, Associate Dean for Research, and Co-Director of the HathiTrust Research Center

J. Stephen Downie, professor and associate dean for research, was quoted in the article "When computers listen to music, what do they hear?" that was published in the Boston Globe on Sunday, July 8, 2012. The article covers work being done in computational musicology and music information retrieval. Downie, an expert in music information retrieval, is the principal investigator for the project Structural Analysis of Large Amounts of Music Information, or SALAMI. His co-PIs are David De Roure from the University of Oxford and Ichiro Fujinaga from McGill University. He is also the director for The International Music Information Retrieval Systems Evaluation Laboratory (IMIRSEL) at GSLIS. IMIRSEL is the principal organizer of MIREX 2012, an annual evaluation campaign for music information retrieval algorithms.

From the article:

One of the groups working on making computers better at listening is an academic organization called SALAMI, which helps digital musicologists and programmers test new analytical tools, and holds a contest every year to see who can come up with the most sensitive audio software. Another is Somerville-based Echo Nest, which formed in 2005 as an outgrowth of a project at the MIT Media Lab. It has since built a business out of helping companies like MTV and Clear Channel build music recommendation tools and online radio stations. At Echo Nest, computer engineers develop algorithms that can take any mp3 file and read the raw signal for so-called “psycho-acoustic attributes” that emerge from a song’s dominant melody, tempo, rhythm, and harmonic structure.

As excited as digital musicologists are to have this high-altitude approach within reach, they tend to feel that more traditional colleagues disapprove of their replacing careful, sensitive listening with statistics. “I think arts and humanities scholars, especially in the postmodern age, don’t like to talk in big sweeping generalities,” said Huron. “We like to emphasize the individual artist, and focus on what’s unique about a particular work of art. And we take a kind of pride in being the most sensitive, the most observant. I think for many scholars, numerical methods are antithetical to the spirit of the humanities.”

“We’re not really here to replace musicologists—I want to stress that, because our old school musicologists get upset by this,” said J. Stephen Downie, a professor at the University of Illinois who serves as a principal investigator on SALAMI. “But we can change the kinds of questions they can answer. No musicologist could ever listen to 20,000 hours of music. We can get a machine to do that, and find connections that they would miss.”

Tags:
Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

New grant to help Multiple Sclerosis patients manage depression

Associate Professor Jessie Chin has received a $215,000 grant from the National Multiple Sclerosis Society (NMSS grant RFA-2411-44091) for a two-year project to improve how people with multiple sclerosis (PwMS) manage depression. 

Jessie Chin

Record number of instructors ranked as excellent

Fifty-seven iSchool instructors were named in the University's List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent for Spring 2025—a record number for the School. The rankings are released every semester, and results are based on the ratings from the Instructor and Course Evaluation System (ICES) questionnaire forms maintained by Measurement and Evaluation in the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning. Only those instructors who administered ICES at least once during the semester and who released their data for publication are included in the list. 

The double arched wooden doors at the entrance of the iSchool, a brick building at 501 E Daniel

Knox recognized as a University Scholar

Interim Dean and Professor Emily Knox is among the five professors at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who have been named 2025 University Scholars in recognition of their achievements in teaching, scholarship, and service.

Emily Knox

New tool helps estimate societal impact of droughts

Droughts are increasingly recognized as environmental crises with far-reaching consequences, not just on water availability, but on agriculture, the economy, public health, and society. While current drought monitoring systems primarily focus on assessing drought severity using quantitative measurements, such as meteorological and hydrological data or economic losses, they often miss what matters most: how societies and communities are affected. 

Dong Wang

Stier to receive ALISE Excellence in Teaching Award

Adjunct Lecturer Zachary Stier has been selected as the Early Career Award recipient of the 2025 Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) Excellence in Teaching Award. He will be honored at an awards presentation during the ALISE 2025 Annual Conference, which will be held from October 6–8 in Kansas City, Missouri.

Zachary Stier