Postdoc Started at King’s College London

Another delayed update: at the start of January I began a new postdoctoral research associate position at King’s College London (KCL)!

I’m working now in the School of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences (BMEIS) on COSMOS: Computational Shaping and Modeling of Musical Structures with Principal Investigator Prof. Elaine Chew. COSMOS is a European Research Council Advanced Grant (AdG) project supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 788960. COSMOS aims to use data science, optimization / data analytics, and citizen science to study musical structures as they are created in music performances and in unusual sources such as cardiac arrhythmias.

In this postdoc I will be continuing my work researching human perception of musical performance and interaction with biodata, starting with some tangible heartbeat projects through an Engagement Grant provided by KCL School of Natural, Mathematical, and Engineering Sciences (NMES), which I am very excited to present in the coming few months around London at KCL and our hospital partners at Guy’s and St. Thomas’s.

Check out the COSMOS website for more info about our work and events coming up!: https://cosmos.isd.kcl.ac.uk/

More info about my and my colleague Dr. Mateusz Soliński‘s new appointment to the COSMOS project

PhD Viva Passed! 🌟

On January 26, I successfully passed by PhD Viva Voce (aka the “defense”)!

The PhD thesis is titled Imagining & Sensing: Understanding and Extending the Vocalist-Voice Relationship Through Biosignal Feedback.

The TLDR (and it is a very long thesis, indeed!); I explored how singers are able to understand complex, internal feedback as they perform. Because the voice exists internally and is a part of the body, vocalists must have refined control and work with their instrument without seeing or touching it. Instead, vocalists rely on internal feelings and intimate understanding of their bodies. I examined how we can externalise some of the sensations and internal movemens to interact with our vocal movement in novel ways, and learn about this connection and be playful with the vocal physiology to better understand ourselves. We then applied this knowledge to communicating subjective sensory experience in musical interaction and human-computer interaction more broadly; hopefully, understanding the interaction with the voice and dialogue with the body will lead us to developing more intuitive, individual-reflective experiences with technology.

My examiners were Prof. Alexander Jensenius (University of Oslo) and Dr. George Fazekas (Queen Mary University of London) – a massive thanks for such an engaging and rewarding viva, and for the helpful feedback.

I’m excited to share more of this work soon – two chapters of my thesis have been adapted for and accepted to the ACM TEI and CHI conferences this year~

Fall 2023 Catch-up

Post CHI 23 submissions, I finally have some time to update on all of the things I’ve been doing at MPI and projects coming this autumn! I’ve updated my CV and this website template so far (baby steps).

Some major things: I’ve renewed my contract with MPI, I have my PhD thesis viva in the very near future, and we submitted three amazing papers to CHI with work done over the summer.

Over the next coming weeks I’ll play a bit of catch-up on the amazing things that have happened this year so far, including the AHs, CHI, and NIME conferences, some music-making, and workshops to be held for the rest of the year!