The Music Computing Lab

The Music Computing Lab at The Open University is a research group focused on empowering musicians, illuminating musical activities, and modelling music perception and cognition. Our work is informed by musicology, psychology, ethnography, embodied cognition, pervasive interaction, mathematics and advanced computing techniques. In particular, we devise and investigate new ways to:

• Empower beginners to engage deeply with musical activities
• Provide new tools and capabilities for expert musicians and theorists
• Cast new light on how music and music perception work.

Reflecting the close relationships between music, mind, brain, body, perception, cognition and physicality, the music computing lab also plays a key role in diverse research projects in digital health, covering topics such as musculo-skeletal and neurological gait rehabilitation, wearables for physiotherapy and management of type 1 diabetes.

Current projects include

• Using whole body movement to understand and control musical harmony
• Design and evaluation of tangible and multi-touch interfaces for collaborative music making
• Using sensors and touch feedback to help musicians improve their posture
• Understanding how people hear harmony
• Exploring computational models of rhythm perception
• Using haptic feedback to help people learn multi-limb rhythms
• Algorithms to discover musical patterns
• Tools for understanding and controlling harmony visually
• Use of multi-touch surfaces for microtonal tunings
• Using embodied cognition to improve music interaction design
• Designing and testing musical instruments controlled directly by the brain.