About The Speaker
John Ashley Burgoyne
John Ashley Burgoyne is the Lecturer in Computational Musicology at the University of Amsterdam and a researcher in the Music Cognition Group at the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation. Cross-appointed in Musicology and Artificial Intelligence, he is interested in understanding musical behavior at the audio level, using large-scale experiments and audio corpora. His McGill–Billboard corpus of time-aligned chord and structure transcriptions has served as a backbone for audio chord estimation techniques. His Hooked on Music project reached hundreds of thousands of participants in almost every country on Earth while collecting data to understand long-term musical memory. Currently, he is working through the Amsterdam Music Lab to understand what people are hearing – and what they are ignoring – while they stream music every day. In 2020, he was part of the Dutch ‘Can AI Kick It’ team for the first edition of the AI Song Contest, and was responsible for evaluating which AI-generated melodies would have had the greatest chance of success at the Eurovision Song Contest.