Publication Alert! This journal paper discusses our automatic music generation system, AffectMachine. The development of this system started back in 2021, and was an interdisciplinary effort (our team members have backgrounds in cognitive science, music composition, and computer science). AffectMachine is capable of creating emotional-sounding music in real time, either based on the user's inputs, or based on their physiological (e.g., HR) or neural signals. We will be embedding the system into a BCI (brain computer interface) to help listeners regulate their emotion states.

Many thanks to the NUS Centre for Development of Teaching & Learning (CDTL) for the opportunity to share my research in teaching practice with the broader community. See the post HERE. This project investigated how teaching relevant findings from cognitive and performance science may be beneficial to the performance practice of music students, and examined the best teaching methods for this purpose.

After months of planning and organization, it's hard to believe that the Music Research in Singapore Symposium is finally upon us! We really have a terrific set of presentations and panel discussions lined up - feeling very lucky and thankful to have such esteemed and diverse members of the community joining, from academics and musicians, to clinicians, arts organizations, and policy makers. Also happy to share that Lynette Pang, Deputy CEO of the National Arts Council, will be our Keynote Speaker. And of course there will be music, and plenty of it.

It seems common sense that a listener's background would influence their musical preferences and emotional responses to music, yet relatively little research has been done in this area. Our research provides a new dataset, and elucidates how age, enculturation, musical training, and other profile information, influences emotion ratings of music. Our new paper, entitled 'A Music Dataset with Emotion Ratings and Raters’ Profile Information' is available in the journal Sensors.

Our paper on 'Comparing Musicians and Non-musicians’ Expectations in Music and Vision' with Marcus Pearce (QMUL) has been published in ACM Audio Mostly. Check out a quick synopsis here!

It was an amazing experience, and quite an honor, to be one of the Keynote speakers at yesterday's Culture Research Symposium on 'The Role of Arts in Well-Being and Social Inclusion', hosted by the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) and the National Arts Council. I was so happy to see the huge turnout (wonderful to be speaking at live events again, given all of the recent restrictions on in-person meetings!).

Looking forward to the 35th Conference of the International Society of Music Education (ISME) next week! It will be my first time attending ISME, and I'll be presenting two papers.

I feel quite thankful for being one of two speakers invited to present at a special event at NUSS Guild Hall on 'A conversation on Emotional Resilience – Finding Emotional Well Being Through Music'. It was wonderful to have the opportunity to share some of my group's recent work on Music for Health and Wellness, and to be part of several wonderful conversations that happened during and after the event. It was also lovely to present in-person AND mask-free for the first time in over two years!

I am honored to be an invited speaker for the lecture series hosted by the National Intrepid Center of Excellence in Washington, DC, next month. I will be talking about 'Music, Technology, and Health', and how we can leverage this exciting intersection of disciplines to forge a new (musical) frontier in healthcare. Attendance is free and open to the public!