Professor Roger Dean awarded ARC Linkage grant

The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development is pleased that an ARC Linkage Project grant has been awarded to Professor Roger Dean and colleagues.

Led by Professor Dean, with co-investigators Associate Professor David Bainbridge (The University of Waikato), Mr John Davis (Australian Music Centre Ltd) and Mr Simon Chambers (Australasian Performing Right Association Ltd/APRA), the project aims to develop a personalised music recommender system using perceived tone quality, affect and liking.

Recommender systems using prior verbal annotations and ratings are common (Amazon) but inappropriate for less popular music by unfamiliar artists, which lacks social use data.

This project intends to build on work into perception of musical affect and its relation to loudness and tone quality; and the automation of the organisation of digital libraries both by labels and acoustic content.

Developing this, the project seeks to create a model that gives recommendations which accounts for an individual's preferences based on acoustic content, affect and liking.

The system will be designed to update rapidly and to encourage exploration of familiar and unfamiliar music.

The three-year ARC Linkage grant will run until 2017.

Congratulations to Roger and colleagues!