Prof Simon Dixon
BSc AMusA LMusA PhD
Professor
Director of The UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in AI and Music
School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science
Queen Mary University of London
Research
Music Informatics, Music Information Retrieval, AI and Music, Audio Signal Processing
Interests
My research interests are in the fields of music informatics (music information retrieval), artificial intelligence, computer music, music signal processing, digital audio and music cognition. In recent years I have mainly worked on high-level music signal analysis, computational modelling of musical knowledge, and the study of musical performance, rhythm, harmony and intonation. For example, I have worked on note and chord transcription, beat tracking, multimodal music alignment, and singing intonation, using signal processing approaches, probabilistic models, and deep learning.
Grants
Grants of specific relevance to the Centre for Multimodal AI
Fine-Grained Assessment and Human-Centred Feedback for AI Music Performance EducationSimon Dixon and
Emmanouil Benetos£220,421
Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music01-09-2026 - 28-02-2030 Scientific Approaches to Music Style Distinctions: A Case Study Based on Four Chinese Regional TraditionsSimon Dixon£413,348
British Academy01-09-2026 - 31-08-2029 AIM CDT Yamaha Studentship: Modeling Jazz PianoSimon Dixon£60,000
Yamaha Corporation01-04-2023 - 31-01-2027 AIM CDT Studentship: Tyler McIntoshSimon Dixon£140,000
DAACI Ltd19-09-2022 - 31-12-2026 UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Artificial Intelligence and MusicSimon Dixon,
Emmanouil Benetos, Nicholas Bryan-Kinns,
Mark Sandler,
Andrew Mcpherson,
Mathieu Barthet,
George Fazekas,
Ekaterina Ivanova,
Anna Xambo Sedo and
Charalampos Saitis£6,522,646
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council01-07-2019 - 31-08-2028
EPSRC additional skills funding summer 2025Akram Alomainy,
Iran Roman, Ella Rice,
Maria Liakata,
Simon Dixon, Giorgio Chianello,
Andrew Livingston,
Kostas Papafitsoros,
Silvia Liverani,
Eleni Matechou and
Linus Wunderlich£180,000
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council 
01-10-2025 - 31-03-2026 Music Performance Assessment and Feedback (MPAF)Simon Dixon and
Emmanouil Benetos£250,000
Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music24-06-2024 - 23-12-2025 High Resolution Guitar TranscriptionSimon Dixon£2,500
Innovate UK13-03-2024 - 15-05-2024 Deep learning technologies for multi-instrument automatic music transcriptionEmmanouil Benetos and
Simon Dixon£252,000
Huawei Technologies15-02-2022 - 14-11-2023 New Directions in Digital Jazz Studies: Music Information Retrieval and AI Support for Jazz Scholarship in Digital ArchivesSimon Dixon£50,845
AHRC Arts and Humanities Research Council14-02-2021 - 13-02-2024 Development of Next Generation Music Recognition Algorithm for Content MonitoringSimon Dixon and
Emmanouil Benetos£159,918
Innovate UK01-11-2019 - 30-06-2021 New Frontiers in Music Information ProcessingSimon Dixon£857,900
EU Commission - Horizon 202001-04-2018 - 31-05-2022 Dig that lickSimon Dixon£106,091
ESRC Economic and Social Research Council01-08-2017 - 31-07-2019
Research Group
PhD Students
- Adan Benito Temprano
Behind The Fret: Gesture Analysis on Fretted Instruments and Its Applications in Instrument Augmentation - Carey Bunks
Deriving The Transformer From Stochastic Signal Processing First Principles - Sungkyun Chang
AI-Driven Music Performance Assessment and Feedback - Leon Chen
Music Foundation Models For Understanding, Evaluation, and Controllable Generation - Drew Edwards
Modeling Jazz Piano: Symbolic Music Generation Via Large-Scale Automatic Transcription - Shahar Elisha
C4DM - David Foster
Modelling The Creative Process of Jazz Improvisation - Nicolas Guo
Towards Tonality-Aware Music Understanding: Modeling Complex Tonal Harmony - Zhengdong He
Neuro-Evolved Heuristics For Meta-Composition (in Collaboration With Daaci) - Shangxuan Luo
Adaptive Music Generation For Video Game - Tyler McIntosh
Expressive Performance Rendering For Music Generation Systems - Mary Pilataki-Manika
Musically-Aware Representations For Multi-Instrument Music Transcription - Eleanor Row
Automatic Micro-Composition For Professional/Novice Composers Using Generative Models as Creativity Support Tools - Ivan Shanin
Modeling Melodic Jazz Improvisation - Yannis Vasilakis
Enhancing Compositionality Properties in Joint Music-Language Models - Ningzhi Wang
Generative Models For Music Audio Representation and Understanding - Jinwen Zhou
Combining Deep Learning and Music Theory
News
June 2026
11 June 2026
On 6-11 July, CMAI researchers will participate at the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), taking place in Seoul, South Korea. ICML is an international academic conference in machine learning held annually since 1980. It is the oldest and, along with NeurIPS and ICLR, one of the three primary conferences ... [more]
April 2026
20 April 2026
On 4-8 May 2026, several CMAI researchers will participate at the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2026). ICASSP is the leading conference in the field of signal processing and the flagship event of the IEEE Signal Processing Society.
As in previous years, the Centre for Multimodal AI ... [more]
October 2025
6 October 2025
On 12-15 October, several CMAI researchers will participate at the 2025 IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics, taking place at the Granlibakken Tahoe Resort near Lake Tahoe, in Tahoe City, CA, USA. WASPAA is a premier event in the field of audio signal processing, organised by ... [more]
September 2025
8 September 2025
On 21-25 September 2025, several CMAI researchers will participate at the 26th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2025). ISMIR is the leading conference in the field of music informatics, and is currently the top-cited publication for Music & Musicology (source: Google Scholar). This year ISMIR will take place onsite in ... [more]
March 2025
24 March 2025
On 6-11 April 2025, several CMAI researchers will participate at the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2025). ICASSP is the leading conference in the field of signal processing and the flagship event of the IEEE Signal Processing Society.
As in previous years, the Centre for Multimodal AI ... [more]
