{"id":576,"date":"2021-10-01T18:22:45","date_gmt":"2021-10-01T18:22:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dougturnbull.org\/?p=576"},"modified":"2021-10-28T15:41:25","modified_gmt":"2021-10-28T15:41:25","slug":"developing-music-ir-research-in-nigeria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dougturnbull.org\/index.php\/2021\/10\/01\/developing-music-ir-research-in-nigeria\/","title":{"rendered":"Developing Music IR Research in Nigeria"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Update on Oct 6, 2021 – Caroline Grass from the Ithacan<\/a> wrote an article about this work entitled “Q&A: IC professor gives keynote address on machine learning.<\/a>“<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last week I gave a keynote talk entitled “Why Research Music” at the IndabaX Nigeria<\/a> conference. Indaba (meaning “gathering” in Xhosa<\/a>) is an organization that “develops knowledge and capacity in machine learning and artificial intelligence in individual countries across Africa.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was invited to give the talk by my friend and colleague Prof. Sakinat Oluwabukonla Folorunso<\/a> from Olabisi Onabanjo University. We met through the Women in Music Information Retrieval<\/a> group and recently started collaborating with her on research involving automatic music classification with Nigerian music genres<\/a>. Sakinat was a primary organizer for the IndabaX conference and I was honored that she asked me to give a talk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For my part, I have always been a little jealous of the large European or UK-based labs that focus on music information retrieval (MusicIR) research. In the US, we tend to have small labs with often just one professor and a couple of students. However, working with Sakinat, I realized just how good I had it in terms of being able to connect with a strong group of mentors, colloraborators, and students within my region (e.g., MusicIR researchers in the Northeastern US and Canada<\/a>) and country. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So the goal for my talk to the Nigerian Machine Learning community was to promote music as a worthy domain of study. I also wanted to connect Sakinat and other researcher in Nigeria with other colleagues from the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) to help promote our research area. I encourage Sakinat to contact the ISMIR board and ask for volunteers to contribte to IndabaX. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the end, we had three contributions:<\/p>\n\n\n\n