home about photos phd v1.0

My recently submitted doctoral thesis discusses CMERS - a Computational Music Emotion Rule System for the control of perceived musical emotions, that modifies a musical work at the levels of score and performance in real-time. I researched, designed, programmed, and tested CMERS, which handles all modifications to the musical work. CMERS achieves a change in perceived musical emotion through the application of music-emotion rules; these rules quantify the empirically observed relations between musical features and specific emotions (for example, major mode ≈ happy, minor mode ≈ sad).

The duduk is a double reed wind instrument from Armenia, first thought to have appeared around 3000 years ago. Notoriously difficult to play, the duduk has a beautiful haunting sound and has been growing in popularity with Western film composers. A few months back you may recall my interest in purchasing a duduk.

Well yesterday morning my duduk arrived. Crafted by hand from aged apricot wood, I picked up one in the diatonic scale of A from duduk.com. I've decided to create a video diary of my progress, with the first instalment coming after my first day of practise. Never having played a reed instrument before, I found the first few minutes rather challenging.

A couple weeks back I was chatting with my friend Darragh about our respective instrument collections. I've got two new instruments I would like to add to the list: the Duduk and the Didgeridoo. I've always been fond of the Duduk, its haunting wailing style has become quite popular in pop culture films like Gladiator and The Crow. After pulling out Delerium's old 1997 album Karma today, I was reminded of just how beautiful the instrument is. As for the Didgeridoo, simply because I love the timbre and having yet another play on my friend's last week. 

A couple of weeks ago I came across a glorious recording of Jascha Heifetz playing the Chaconne from J.S. Bach's Partita no. 2 for Solo Violin in D minor; parts 1 & 2. The playing is superb, perhaps the best I've ever heard. This recording was made when Heifetz was in his prime, and is superior to his later performances. Remember that you can also download YouTube clips.

You can find out more about the group Huun-Huur-Tu at their website.

This news made my f@cking day [2]. It's nice to see a different type of plastic winning the Eurovision contest. You can watch their lead track 'Hard Rock Hallelujah' over at Google Video. If like myself you didn't watch the show, you can catch also watch their live performance, or view some photos. Some of their other music videos include: Would you love a monsterman?, Devil is a loser and Blood red sandman. Their official site also has some more information.

On Keys to Music this week, Graham Abbott takes a look at JS Bach's "St John's Passion".  A 55 minute radiocast available in real and win formats.