The Hidden History of Pop Music | Matthias Mauch | TEDxGoodenoughCollege

Everyone has an opinion on music; people enjoy it daily all around the world. Matthias Mauch enjoys it too, but he also likes to look at it from a slightly different perspective. By using quantitative analyses, he looks a little closer on what is actually happening in popular music during the last 50 years. His analyses show remarkable findings in the structure and diversity of music. It is almost like looking at music with a pair of evolutionary biologist eyes…well…that IS what he eventually did - he utilised selection, recombination and mutation, to explain the evolution of music.

Matthias Mauch is a researcher in music informatics. As an undergraduate mathematics student in Rostock, Germany, he earned his pocket money as an amateur musician. Combining his passions for maths and music he went on to do a Ph.D. in electronic engineering at Queen Mary University of London – on algorithms to automatically transcribe chords from music recordings.

After a post-doc in Japan and a Research Fellowship at Last.fm returned to Queen Mary in 2012 on a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship, investigating music signal processing, human singing, and the evolution of musical style. He’s published over 40 peer-reviewed conference and journal papers.

Together with his research collaborators from Imperial College London he’s a recipient of a 2012 Cozzarelli Prize for scientific excellence and originality from the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.

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