André Holzapfel

Associate professor

Kungliga Tekniska Högskolanhttps://www.kth.se/profile/holzap

Works for

DIVISION OF MEDIA TECHNOLOGY AND INTERACTION DESIGN

Address

LINDSTEDTSVÄGEN 3, PLAN 6

E-mail

holzap@kth.se

Room

1629

Researcher ID

ORCID IDGoogle Scholar ID

About me

Since October 1, 2016, I am with the Division of Media Technology and Interaction Design, currently as Assoc. Prof. of Media Technology with specialization is Sound and Music Computing. I hold two PhD titles, one in computer science and the other in ethnomusicology with the subject of dance tradition in Crete, Greece.

My research focuses on the intersection between music and technology, for instance, by using computational analyses in studies of music corpora or by investigating the development of technology for creative purposes. I have contributed to the computational analysis of rhythm in the field of Music Information Retrieval, and have focused my ethnographic work on music and dance in Crete, Greece. My multidisciplinary background helps me to investigate the potential of combining quantitative, computational methods with qualitative, ethnographic methods in music research, an investigation that I like to refer to as Computational Ethnomusicology.

Specific research topics that I focus on are:

Ethical and sustainability aspects of computation for music, and the arts in general.
Currently, I expand this to the consideration of legal aspects of AI in artistic contexts and creative industries.
Historically informed design of electronic music instruments.
Music corpus analysis, especially of rhythmic aspects such as tempo, timing, and relation of performance to meter.
The relation of dance and music, in particular in the island of Crete.
Interactive music systems that interpret body movements.

We offer a wide range of subjects for student thesis projects in Creative Media Technology, a list of projects can be found on our team website.

Click here for a (short) CV.

Before moving to Stockholm, I was a Austrian Science Fund fellow at the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI). My project aimed at discovering rhythmic characteristics in various musics by using combinations of Bayesian methods and deep learning.

From 2013-15 I was in a Marie Curie project named "RhythMus", focused on the analysis of rhythmic aspects in Turkish Makam music. This research was conducted at the Boğaziçi University in the team of Taylan Cemgil. The work was closely related to the Compmusic project, in which I worked the year before, and the focus of my work was exploring rhythmic and tonal properties of Turkish Makam music.

Before I was with INESC Porto for a one-year post-doc project on "Music Synthesis by Analysis". From September 2010 until February 2011 I was invited for a mini post-doc OFAI in Vienna, working on improvement of rhythm descriptors.

On 2 March 2010, I successfully defended my Ph.D. thesis which has been conducted in the Multimedia Informatics Lab at University of Crete. The subject of my thesis was the development of methods for analysis and information retrieval of traditional forms of music. The goal was to detect automatically morphological similarities between different pieces. The thesis was supervised by Yannis Stylianou. My PhD work was funded by the Institute of Computer Science.

I graduated in 2004 at the Department of Media at University of Applied Sciences in Duesseldorf Germany, and received a master degree at the Department of Computer Science at University of Crete in 2006. Before attending the postgraduate programme in Crete, I was working as a software developer at Creamware Datentechnik. There I was in charge of the development of electronic tube and electric circuit emulations, which are now used in the Dynatube guitar and bass amplifier plugins.