Dr Jordan B. L. Smith

Profile

Jordan is a Lecturer in Audio Signal Processing in SPCS. He teaches digital audio in the Queen Mary School Hainan program, and conducts research in co-operation with the Centre for Digital Music (C4DM) in EECS.

He earned a BA in Music and Physics at Harvard College, an MA in Music Technology at McGill University, an MSc in Operations Research Engineering at the University of Southern California, and a PhD in Computer Science at QMUL. He has worked at government research labs (3 years at AIST Japan) and in industry (3.5 years at TikTok).

Teaching

QHE4101: Introduction to Digital Audio

Research

Research Interests:

Jordan's research career has focused on music structure, the nested patterns of repetition that exist within songs. His contributions include: models for predicting the long-term structure of songs; investigations into how listeners make sense of structure; methods of generating music with structure; algorithms for extracting loops and predicting their compatibility; and games and interfaces for remixing songs.

His work has appeared in the journals TISMIR, JNMR, Music Theory Online and IEEE Multimedia, and in the proceedings of ISMIR, ICASSP, AAAI, and elsewhere. With his PhD supervisor Prof. Elaine Chew and with Prof. Gerard Assayag, he edited the book Mathemusical Conversations.

Publications

Chen, H., J. B. L. Smith, B. Li, J.-C. Wang, J. Spijkervet, P. Zou, X. Du, and Q. Kong. 2024. SymPAC: Scalable symbolic music generation with prompts and constraints. To appear in Proceedings of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR). San Francisco, USA.

Wang, J.-C., Y.-N. Hung, and J. B. L. Smith. 2022. To catch a chorus, verse, intro, or anything else: Analyzing a song with structural functions. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP). 416–20.

Nieto, O., G. J. Mysore, C.-i. Wang, J. B. L. Smith, J. Schlüter, T. Grill, and B. McFee. 2020. Audio-Based Music Structure Analysis: Current Trends, Open Challenges, and Applications. Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval 3:1, 246-–63.

Smith, J. B. L., Y. Kawasaki, and M. Goto. 2019. Unmixer: An interface for extracting and remixing loops. In Proceedings of ISMIR. 824–31. Delft, Netherlands.

Smith, J. B. L., J. Kato, S. Fukayama, G. Percival, and M. Goto. 2017. The CrossSong Puzzle: Developing a logic puzzle for musical thinking. Journal of New Music Research 46:3. 213–28.

Scholarly Contributions

Google Scholar

ORCID