This pair of distinguished lectures from two of the foremost music computing experts begins at 14:30, followed by student project demos. There will be breaks, and refreshments will be provided.

This event (from 14:30) forms the Strand Campus part of the "MARC open day" which starts earlier. For details and to register, please visit the open day main site: https://marc.kcl.ac.uk/2026/05/marc-open-day/.

Speakers:

• Cheng-Zhi Anna Huang is an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with a shared position in the Music & Theater Arts Section and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. She joined MIT in fall 2024 to launch the new, interdisciplinary Music Technology and Computation Graduate Program. For the past 10 years, Huang has been with the Magenta team in Google Brain and then Google DeepMind, spearheading efforts in generative modeling, reinforcement learning, and human-computer interaction. In 2018, she created Music Transformer, a breakthrough in generating music with long-term structure and the first successful adaptation of the transformer architecture to music. Huang is the creator of the machine-learning model Coconet, which powered Google’s first AI Doodle, the Bach Doodle. In two days, Coconet harmonized 55 million melodies from users around the world. Currently the Rieman and Baketel Fellow for Music at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Huang previously held a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute. She was a judge then organizer for the AI Song Contest in 2020–2022. She holds a PhD from Harvard University, where she spent several years in the Harvard University Studio for Electroacoustic Composition. She did her master’s at the MIT Media Lab and a dual bachelor’s in music composition and computer science at the University of Southern California.

 

• Roger B. Dannenberg is Emeritus Professor of Computer Science, Art & Music. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, known for his research in the field of computer music. He is the co-creator of Audacity, an audio editor that has been downloaded 100’s of millions of times, and his patents for Computer Accompaniment were the basis for the SmartMusic system used by hundreds of thousands of music students. His current work includes live music performance with artificial computer musicians, automatic music composition, interactive media and high-level languages for sound synthesis. Prof. Dannenberg is also a trumpet player and composer. He has performed in concert halls ranging from the historic Apollo Theater in Harlem to the modern Espace de Projection at IRCAM in Paris. Besides numerous compositions for musicians and interactive electronics, Dannenberg co-composed the opera La Mare dels Peixos with Jorge Sastre, and translated and produced the opera in English as The Mother of Fishes, in Pittsburgh in 2020.