We had an amazing experience at the SMPC conference in Nashville earlier this month! Not only were we able to share our project during our poster presentation but we also learned from many experienced researchers, including one of the authors of a research article central to our research: Dr. Daniel Levitin. We also made some time for sightseeing and fun! Thanks again so much to everyone who supported us! Below are some photos from our adventure. You can find the rest of our photos at: https://goo.gl/photos/Gs4NVcMbZ31nXaYa8.

Hi everyone! We are sorry that it’s been awhile since our last post but we’re eager to update you on our exciting news! First, our LaunchUMD campaign was a huge success. We were able to raise $4,100! Thanks again to all of our supporters. This money supporting our research allows us to send our entire team to Nashville, TN this August for the 2015 Society for Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC) Conference. Second, the SMPC Conference Chairs notified us that our paper has been accepted for presentation as a poster at the Conference! So we officially get to participate as well as learn from other presenters. Third, we recently came across Weka, a tool for machine learning, to apply to our song feature data. That’s all for now!

Hey everyone! Our Launch UMD page goes live TOMORROW (Monday Feb. 23rd)! We are very excited and hope to have your support for our campaign. You will be able to access our Launch UMD page at https://www.launch.umd.edu/teammusic. With each donation, we will be closer to being able to attend the 2015 Society for Music Perception and Cognition conference in Nashville, TN. This conference is being hosted by Vanderbilt University, and will present a variety of interesting research projects and developments involving music perception. We’ll be regularly posting updates about our Launch UMD progress throughout this upcoming month. Thanks for tuning in!

Here’s Team MUSIC, back with another blog update. First off, we have submitted our abstract to SMPC, so we’re eagerly waiting to hear back from them. If the Society accepts our proposal, then we will be able to present at their conference this summer. Next up, our first online survey is undergoing some changes. Rather than collect data on how participants’ perceptions of music compare to The Echo Nest API values and the five-factor cognitive music model values, we are focusing on the viability of the five-factor model for forecasting music preferences in song recommendation. We believe that this change will be more useful to our research by proving that the cognitive music model is a feasible medium for determining and organizing song preferences. Additionally, our Launch UMD page is almost finished. We anticipate it being live by Feb. 23rd, so be on the look out for our campaign.

Hello! We hope everyone is enjoying their spring semester so far. First off, we would like to give a huge thank you to Dr. Jason Rentfrow, who has been very helpful in answering all of our questions, and has been an incredibly valuable resource for us as we progress through our research. In addition, with the upcoming Launch UMD advising meeting we have scheduled this week, we should be able to start our Launch UMD campaign shortly. For those of you who don’t know, Launch UMD is a fundraising platform that allows groups on campus to raise money for various causes. We will be raising money to fund our conference trip to the Society of Music Perception and Cognition this summer, and we will need your help! If you are curious about Launch UMD here is the link to some frequently asked questions: https://www.launch.umd.edu/faq. More information to come soon.

Good news, everyone! Our Launch UMD application has been approved, and we are preparing for fundraising our conference trip! We’re currently filming a video for the Launch UMD campaign. You’ll be able to see our campaign page soon. We’ve also made a small breakthrough in the form of a Python script we wrote that interfaces with The Echo Nest API, allowing us to more easily input lists of song queries, search them, and output their significant features to a file to prepare for statistical analysis.

We hope everyone had a great winter break! As we approach the upcoming spring semester, we’re making preparations for our initial online survey. This survey will help us learn more about how Rentfrow’s cognitive music model can be incorporated into The Echo Nest platform for an effective music recommendation method. We’re also preparing for our Launch UMD campaign to fund our trip to the SMPC conference this summer. More to come for next week. Looking forward to seeing everyone again!

Hi everyone! Team MUSIC here with another update. Our Launch UMD application is currently under review, so we expect to start our fundraising campaign in the near future. Our trip to the Society of Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC) conference this upcoming summer will be entirely funded through Launch UMD, so we’ll need your help! As for our upcoming research survey, we’re now finalizing it so that we can submit it to IRB (Institutional Review Board). We’ll be asking for survey participants once we get approval from IRB, so be sure to keep an eye out for that as well. More updates to come next week!

Hi everyone! As you may have noticed, our website is undergoing reconstruction in response to our updated methodology. The plan for us this upcoming semester is to correlate features from Rentfrow’s five-factor cognitive music model with those of Echo Nest (an application programming interface) for a novel way of organizing music.

We are currently drafting an online survey that will assess the ability of The Echo Nest API to accurately model human perception, and will release it after receiving IRB (Institutional Review Board) approval. We’re also making preparations to apply for the Society of Music Perception and Cognition Conference this summer, with the intention of presenting our research findings there. This conference will be funded by our LaunchUMD campaign in a few months. Keep posted for more updates!