April 03, 2007 —
Ching-Hua Chuan, a PhD candidate in Computer Science, and member of Assoc. Prof. Elaine Chew's Music Computation and Cognition Laboratory (MuCoaCo
), has been awarded one of the three USC Graduate School Digital Dissertation Fellowships for 2007-08. Graduate School Fellowships in Digital Scholarship are designed to foster multimedia research that expands the potential of academic publication via emergent and transitional media. These fellowships support graduate students in the production of new scholarship that is based on a thorough rethinking of the dynamic relationship of form to content in academic research. Fellowship awards include a 12 month stipend of $24,000, and 12 units of tuition for each of the fall and spring semesters. Fellowship funding covers the year from July 1, 2007 through June 30, 2008.
Ms. Chuan proposed a digital dissertation project entitled "Automatically Generated Style-Specific Musical Accompaniment." In her words, "This project aims to create a computer-assisted music-making system that takes a user’s original melody (input by humming), and automatically creates (by a combination of statistical and knowledge-based methods) sophisticated accompaniment for the melody, in the style of the user’s favorite piece or music band."
Another MuCoaCo student, Arpi Mardirossian, is presently a Digital Dissertation Fellow for the 2006-2007 academic year for her project on music similarity and visualization.
