The MTG is starting a new H2020 European Project TROMPA: Towards Richer Online Music Public-domain Archives, coordinated by Emilia Gómez (MIRlab) which will be carried out under the topic CULT-COOP-09-2017. This is a 3-year project that will start in May 2018.

The MTG is looking to hire two PhD students, one postdoctoral fellow and a junior developer to join the MTG-TROMPA team.

TROMPA description  

Classical music is one of the greatest treasures of Europe’s cultural heritage. Although it is a historical genre, it is continually (re)interpreted and revitalised through musical performance. Today, most of the classical repertoire is in the public domain; massive numbers of scores and recordings are now available in online community-contributed repositories actively used by scholars and musicians. Technology offers ways to enrich and contextualise this repertoire, so that users might better understand and appreciate it.

However, because of variations in their quality and scale, this does not happen automatically for public-domain resources. Amidst today’s deluge of data, relevant associations across repositories and between modalities (e.g. from scores to recordings) still need to be made manually, while the insights of previous users are not explicitly stored for future users to learn from. It is thus impossible to get a comprehensive insight into the full wealth of our musical cultural heritage.

TROMPA will change this by massively enriching and democratising our publicly available musical heritage through a user-centred co-creation setup. For analysing and linking music data at scale, the project will employ and improve state-of-the-art technology. Music-loving citizens (including the large scene of amateur performers) will cooperate with the technology, giving feedback on algorithmic results, and annotating the data according to their personal expertise.

Following an open innovation philosophy, all derived knowledge will be released back to the community in reusable ways. This enables many uses in applications which directly benefit crowd contributors and wider audiences. TROMPA will demonstrate this for music scholars, content owners, instrumentalists, choir singers, and music enthusiasts. Via the consortium and associated partners, global audiences can be reached at an unprecedented scale, with potential outreach to millions of users.

MTG focus in TROMPA

Research on well-defined music information retrieval (MIR) tasks (source separation, automatic transcription, auto-tagging) and singing voice analysis and synthesis, with a focus on building applications for choir singing and the general public.

In particular, we will research on state of the art deep learning techniques and related methodologies for data annotation and algorithm evaluation. TROMPA focuses on the definition of hybrid models combining human and machine computation, and the creation of open repositories and datasets for training and evaluation.

A special interest of TROMPA is on the interaction between humans and MIR algorithms (human-algorithm interaction), addressing topics related to fairness, transparency, explainability and trust.

Postdoctoral Fellowship

The postdoctoral fellow will carry out part-time (50%) project coordination duties (co-supervision of PhD students and assistance to PI for EU project coordination) and part-time (50%) research in their area of interest related to the project. The fellowship will not involve any teaching duties.

Interested candidates should have a PhD in areas related to the TROMPA project, strong publication record and community involvement.

PhD Fellowships

Candidates for must hold an MsC degree or equivalent. Students will pursue doctoral studies in the context of the TROMPA project.

Only candidates accepted to the PhD program in ICT of UPF are eligible for a fellowship. Hence, every fellowship application should be paired up with an admission application into the PhD program. Admission to the PhD DTIC program is handled by the university admission office, further details available here.

Junior developer

We are looking for a full-stack developer with a Master degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent. The developer will ideally have experience in modern front-end web development including React, and back-end development including Python (Django, flask, or similar) and storage systems (PostgreSQL, MongoDB).They should be able to work and deliver autonomously while being a part of a team.

Starting date

May 1st 2018 (this date can be extended until October 1st for PhD student and developer)

How to apply?