Events

Date: 1 July 2026   Time: 11:00 - 12:00     

Location: G2 Room. Engineering Building. Mile End Campus.

The seminar is structured in two parts. The first part will present a new testing procedure for the implicit assessment of the emotional-semantic content of music. The procedure is based on the well-known effects of film music that can shift the emotional-semantic perception of visual scenes and it has been developed in the context of evaluating audio branding assets. The second part considers evaluation and liking at the collective level and presents a new computational model for analysing the popularity dynamics on the Billboard charts. Rather than audio analysis, market data, or psychometric preference measures, it explores of how we can think about assessing popularity over time given only the data in music charts themselves.

Daniel Müllensiefen is professor of systematic musicology and music psychology at the University of Hamburg, Germany. From 2006 to 2024 he worked at Goldsmiths, University of London, first in the computing department and then in the psychology department co-directing the MSc in Music, Mind, and Brain.

John Ashley Burgoyne is Assistant Professor in Computational Musicology at the University of Amsterdam and director of the Amsterdam Music Lab. His work unifies approaches from corpus analysis, psychological measurement, and AI representation learning to help machines listen a little more like people do...and occasionally to help people listen a little more like machines.