Silly (but fun) little thing

I'm "Sara Does Science"'s "Science Crush Friday" for the week. Includes the wonderful (if fanciful) line "Michael Scott Cuthbert is music’s Indiana Jones" and the description "Not a bad looking guy at all! And he kind of reminds me of Ross from Friends, but the smile makes him seem less neurotic." For the record, I am equally neurotic, just in different ways.

Thanks Sara!

Update 2026-Jan (reprinting the original below since Sara Callori's blog seems to have vanished and the Archive.org link is unstable)

 

Science Crush Friday!

So I was feeling kind of crappy this morning and my plan orginally was to phone in Science Crush Friday this week with some gratuitous Neil deGrasse Tyson pictures, because I will never get tired of astronomy’s big, chocolate bear.

 

But then an internet friend of mine posted this article about an MIT professor who uses computational data analysis to study music. And I have to say, computational data analysis is pretty darn scientific.

 

Now, I was a bit skeptical at first, because I’ve been to some talks recently on the intersection of data and music/art, and they’ve all seemed to focus on people who use data to make something interesting artistically. The end products, however, seem to be divorced from the data in that you don’t learn something about the data from experiences about the art. And when I think of the intersection of data/science and art, I want the art to reflect the science, dammit!

 

Today’s science crush is MIT professor Michael Scott Cuthbert. He gets this honor because he has made me rethink the relationship between data analysis and music. Also, take a gander at this fellow.

 

 

Not a bad looking guy at all! And he kind of reminds me of Ross from Friends, but the smile makes him seem less neurotic.

 

But what really makes him crush-worthy is how cool his work is. But before I go into this, a disclaimer: For a physicist, I am a pretty bad programmer, and as far as music goes, I’ve just started learning about it, so my understanding of his work is more on the level of “SO COOL!!! It’s part music, part science, and part magic!” rather than “Oh, I appreciate the nuance of this code and how you can apply it to major chords.”

 

For starters, check out this awesome piece of data analysis. It takes a serial music piece (which, to anyone who likes science and math is a cool thing itself) and it able to map out a relationship between note pitches, duration, and how much they occur in the music. I wouldn’t be able to tell you what this means about the Messiaen piece, but I can appreciate learning about different styles of music by looking at musical data in a visual form. Hell, this is how I learn about current research in my field, through lots of plots!

 

Analysis like this can be applied to track musical trends not just on a piece-by-piece basis but throughout history! He’s like a musical archaeologist! And he can use his code to help learn things about lost music from hundreds of years ago! Michael Scott Cuthbert is a musical Indiana Jones! (As opposed to Indiana Jones: The musical, which doesn’t exist but would be amazing.)

 

 

(I’m not too great with Photoshop, either.)

 

———-

 

This just in! More proof that Michael Scott Cuthbert is music’s Indiana Jones.

 

MIT Tech Article on Michael Cuthbert

Derek Chang of the MIT Tech published an interview with me in today's issue. Read it here. The opening appears below:

$500,000 grant for music research at MIT

Michael Scott Cuthbert, associate professor of music, was recently awarded a $500,000 grant from the Digging into Data consortium. This grant will support his work in using computational techniques to study changes in Western musical style. He has received $175,000 specifically for his music21 project . On Thursday, Cuthbert sat with The Tech to discuss his work with music21 and his passion for combining computational techniques with music.

The Tech: Many of us with a musical background must be interested in your computational work and how it applies to music. What is the motivation behind your project?

Cuthbert: One of the main ways artists analyze art work or music is examining a piece very carefully, from all possible dimensions. But it’s really hard to put the work into the context of the time. How is the piece representative of its time period, or how does it break the mold? It takes us a very long time to look at one piece. In contrast, computers are good at getting an overview of a particular problem. For example, what patterns exist in how chords progress from one to another? Is the piece being looked at representative of the music grammar for the period? (...read more...)