Vacancy: PhD student Sensing Emotion in Music

The Department of Information and Computing Sciences of Utrecht
University (Netherlands) invites applications for a PhD. position in
Music Computing on Sensing Emotion in Music.

Sensing Emotion in Music is part of the national ICT research program
COMMIT (http://www.commit-nl.nl/). Within COMMIT, the project Virtual
Worlds for Wellbeing will develop technologies to register and elicit
emotions in avatars, to enrich the experience in virtual worlds and to
stimulate physical and emotional wellbeing. Sensing Emotion in Music
will realize these aims within the domain of music.

Music has a big emotional impact on people. Sensing Emotion in Music
will create computational models that deal with the musical aspects of
semantic and emotional information in personal communication. Musical
meaning emerges from the confrontation between complex patterns we
perceive in acoustical input and a repository of such patterns that we
have previously acquired through listening and training. For example,
rhythmic, harmonic, and formal patterns are important sources of meaning
in music. Musical audio has been analyzed mainly on the basis of low
level features. By researching the role of high level patterns extracted
from musical audio from both a music cognition and a computer science
viewpoint, the PhD. student will provide essential knowledge for the
creation of advanced music technology applications that can contribute
to physical and emotional wellbeing.
The PhD. student will collaborate with the PhD. student of the parallel
project Sensing Emotion in Video and contribute to the Crowd Simulation
Demo that acts as an application scenario of COMMIT technology.

The PhD student will concentrate on designing and implementing novel
methods of Music Information Retrieval. Specific tasks include:
o creating feature extraction methods
o modeling similarity of high-level musical patterns
o designing methods for emotion-based similarity matching
o creating methods for locating salient segments
The PhD student is expected to deliver a completed PhD thesis within 4
years.

Requirements
o Masters degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence,
Mathematics, Humanities Computing, or any other relevant discipline
o proven affection with and knowledge of music (notation, basic theory)

The candidate is offered a full-time position for 4 years. Salary starts
at € 2,042.- and increases to € 2,612.- gross per month in the fourth
year of the appointment. The salary is supplemented with a holiday bonus
of 8% and an end-of-year bonus of 8,3% per year. In addition we offer: a
pension scheme, a partially paid parental leave, flexible employment
conditions. Conditions are based on the Collective Labour Agreement
Dutch Universities.

More information about the vacancy can be obtained from Prof. Dr. Remco
Veltkamp (R.C.Veltkamp@uu.nl; +31 30 253 4091) or Dr. Frans Wiering
(F.Wiering@uu.nl; +31 30 253 6335).

Please send your application (including a letter of motivation,
curriculum vitae and contact details of two referees) via the link Apply
at the end of the official vacancy page
(http://ssl1.peoplexs.com/Peoplexs22/CandidatesPortalNoLogin/Vacancy.cfm?PortalID=4124&VacatureID=190457&BedrijfID=0).
Application deadline is 23 January 2012. As part of the selection
procedure, the candidate is expected to give a presentation about
his/her Master thesis research and research plans for the PhD project.


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dr. Frans Wiering
e-mail: F.Wiering@uu.nl
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Utrecht University
Department of Information and Computing Sciences (ICS)
Buys Ballot Laboratory, office 482
Princetonplein 5, De Uithof
PO Box 80.089
NL-3508 TB Utrecht
tel: +31-30-2536335
fax: +31-30-2532804
www: http://www.cs.uu.nl/staff/fransw.html
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