Algomus

🇫🇷 français

Algomus – Algorithmic Musicology – is a research team in Digital Humanities, more precisely in Musical Information Retrieval (MIR). We focus on high-level modeling, analysis, and co-creative generation of music, for music theorists, musicians, music lovers, and everyone. The team also conducts research on the ethics of music research, whether concerning AI or the diversity of musical repertoires. We are located in the Hauts-de-France region. We belong to the CRIStAL computer science department of the Université de Lille and have strong links with the MIS computer science lab of the Université de Picardie Jules-Verne, in Amiens. We are also funded by the CPER MAUvE and by Sciences et Cultures du Visuel. We use the scientific computing service Mésocentre de Lille.

Music co-intelligence and co-creativity

Collaborating with music theorists, we study symbolic data – mainly music scores, but also tablatures, chord grids, other music data and metadata. We focus on tonal music – such as in baroque, classical, romantic, jazz, pop, and dance repertoires.

We model patterns, melodies, harmony (chords, chord progressions, cadences), rhythms, texture. We ultimately aim to model music structure. Over the years, the team worked on musical forms

We combine musicological knowledge and computer science methods in text algorithmics, data mining, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). Black-box methods analyzing or producing music are not our main focus. We are rather interested in designing explainable algorithmic and ML/AI methods trying to model what makes music and providing people with tools to help them to understand, to play with, and finally to enjoy music. The team uses music structure as a “driving force” to model, analyze, and generate music, in the two following themes:

Music modeling and analysis for systematic/empirical musicology. The team has a strong record track in Computational Music Analysis. Over the years, the team worked on musical forms such as fugues and variations (2013-16) and sonata forms (2016-19), and now (2022-) piano sonata and trio sonata. We develop techniques for modeling, preparing, and interacting with musical corpora, to curate and organize large-scale collections of musical data, ensuring efficient access, searchability, and analysis of diverse musical materials. With collaboration of music theorists, we aim to provide new perspectives on musical forms, genres, styles, and cultural contexts, and also to provide tools for music pedagogy.
Co-creative music modeling and generation. Knowledge modeling and machine learning techniques are also used as a way of exploring music generation for various co-creative tasks such as computer-assisted composition or arrangement, or human-machine co-improvisation. Our focus on high-level structures on symbolic data enables us to investigate areas and dynamics of musical co-creativity that are rarely explored. This is shown for instance, by our participation in the AI song Contest 2020 and 2021 where we were one of the rare teams to include structure and arrangement in their co-creative process, or by our contribution to the 2024-25 project The Call with Holly Herndon.

Open methods, open data

We publish our methods, our code, and our corpora in the Music Information Retrieval community. Most of our data is available under open-source licenses from http://gitlab.com/algomus.fr/algomus-data. Our corpora are also published on the Dezrann platform.

Dezrann, a platform to share music analysis

Music research for everyone

We collaborate with musicians, music teachers, artists, and music companies. Dezrann, our web platform to share music analysis, is used in secondary schools and elsewhere to help people to think and to talk about music, while promoting musical heritage. We contribute to science&arts projects, to music&health projects, to popular science events… and even sometimes to song contests with a Eurovision-like song or an ambient electronica track (2020-21). We organize regular seminars, open to everyone, on music, technology and computer science.

Meet the team

Ken Déguernel (CNRS researcher starting from 2023, CRIStAL)
Mathieu Giraud (Senior CNRS researcher, CRIStAL, head)
Alexandre D’Hooge (PhD student, CRIStAL)
Dinh-Viet-Toan Le (PhD student, CRIStAL)
Emmanuel Leguy (Software engineer, CRIStAL)
Florence Levé (Associate professor, MIS and CRIStAL)
Yann Teytaut (Associate professor, CRIStAL)
Patrice Thibaud (PhD student and associate lecturer, Univ. Lille)
Rui Yang (PhD student from Oct 2024, CRIStAL, from China and UK 🇨🇳🇬🇧)

Collaborators

Richard Groult (Associate professor, LITIS/TIBS, Université de Rouen Normandie)

2025 Internships and Visits

2025: Aurélien Jeanneau (Master student from ATIAM, CRIStAL)
2025: Valentin Crogiez (Bachelor student from Univ. Lille, CRIStAL)
2025: Ajda Vardjan (Master student from Univ. Ljubljana, Slovenia 🇸🇮)
2025: Yanis Derouiche (Master student from Univ. Lille, CRIStAL)

Past staff members and students

2021-2024: Louis Couturier 🎓 (PhD student, MIS)
2021-2024: Francesco Maccarini 🎓 (PhD student, CRIStAL, from Italy 🇮🇹)
2021-2024: Vanessa Nina Borsan 🎓 (PhD student, CRIStAL, from Slovenia 🇸🇮)
2024: Romain Carl (Master student from ENS Lyon, CRIStAL)
2024: Zakaria Hassein-Bey (Bachelor student from Univ. Lille, CRIStAL)
2024: Stevenson Panther (Master student from Univ. Lille, CRIStAL)
2024: Théo de Pinho (Bachelor student from Univ. Lille, CRIStAL)
2024: Matteo Plichon (Bachelor student from Univ. Lille, CRIStAL), with MINT
2023-2024: Baptiste Bacot (Post-doc researcher, CRIStAL)
2022-2024: Charles Ballester (Software engineer, CRIStAL)
2015-2023: Louis Bigo (Associate professor, CRIStAL), now full professor at Université de Bordeaux 🎉
2023: Jérémie Roux (Master student from Univ. Montpellier, CRIStAL)
2023: Tom Taffin (Bachelor student from Univ. Lille, CRIStAL)
2022: Mathieu Kermarec (Master student from Centrale Nantes, CRIStAL)
2022: Maxime Michel (Master student from Univ. Reims, CRIStAL and MIS)
2022: Thomas Obry (Bachelor student from Univ. Lille, CRIStAL)
2021-2022: Ken Déguernel (Post-doc, CRIStAL)
2021-2022: Lou Garczynski (Software engineer, CRIStAL)
2021: Dinh-Viet-Toan Le (Master student from SupAero & ATIAM, CRIStAL)
2021: Louis Couturier (Master student, CRIStAL)
2021: Quentin Normand (Master student from Polytech’Lille, CRIStAL)
2017-2021: Laurent Feisthauer 🎓 (PhD student, CRIStAL)
2015-2020: Pierre Allegraud (Associate lecturer, Univ. Lille)
2020: David Régnier (Master student from Polytech’Lille, CRIStAL)
2020: Louis Soum-Fontez (Bachelor student from ENSIMAG, MIS, UPJV)
2020: Benoît Camaro (Bachelor student from Polytech Lille, CRIStAL)
2019-2020: Gianluca Micchi (Post-doc, CRIStAL, from Italia 🇮🇹)
2019: Jules Cournut (Master student from ISIMA, Univ. Clermont Auvergne, CRIStAL)
2014-2019: Nicolas Guiomard-Kagan 🎓 (Associate lecturer, former PhD student, MIS)
2018: Alain Riou (Bachelor student from ENS Saclay, CRIStAL)
2018: Ling Ma (Master student from Univ. Lille, CRIStAL)
2015-2018: Sławek Staworko (Associate professor, CRIStAL)
2017: Florian Voorwinden (Bachelor student from ENS Rennes, CRIStAL)
2016: Chloé Paris (Bachelor student from ENS Lyon, CRIStAL)
2015-2016: Ophélie Hérouart (Master student, ESAD Amiens, MIS, UPJV)
2015-2016: Matthieu Caron (Bachelor/Master student from FIL, CRIStAL, Lille 1)
2014: Guillaume Bagan (Software engineer, LIFL)
2014: Ken Déguernel (Master student from INSA Rouen, LIFL)
2014-2015: Florent Mercier (Master student from FIL, LIFL)
2014: Nathan Marécaux (Bachelor student from ISEN, LIFL)
2013: Laurent David (Master student from ENSEA, LIFL)
2013: Corentin Louboutin (Bachelor student from ENS Cachan/Bretagne, LIFL)
2010: Cyril Séguin (Master student, MIS)

News, events

See on Twitter @algomus for our last news

December 2024: 🎓🎓🎓 Three PhD defenses :)
November 2024: Welcome to Rui Yang, new PhD student!
October 2023: Patrice Thibaud join the team as a new PhD student
September 2023: Louis Bigo, that spent 8 years in our team, just got a full professor position in Bordeaux. Congratulations!
March 2023: Welcome to Baptiste Bacot, new post-doc working on guitar
October 2022: We welcome Alexandre and Viet-Toan, two new PhD students!
August 2022: We welcome Charles Ballester, new engineer working on Dezrann!
September 2021: Three new PhD students in the team! Welcome to Francesco, Louis, and Vanessa!
January 2021: We welcome Lou Garczinksi, new engineer, to work on Dezrann. Welcome Louis !
October 2020: The virtual ISMIR 2020 was great!
June 2020: We welcome two students, Benoît Camaro and Louis Soum-Fontez, to work on guitar licks and on music texture
May 2020: New journal article on Roman Numeral Analysis
April-May 2020: We were very happy to participate in the AI Song Contest and to finish at the 4th place
March 2020: We welcome David Régnier, master student, for his master thesis on guitar tabs
December 2019: Our journal paper on Sonata Forms has just been published by TISMIR
November 2019: We enjoyed a lot ISMIR 2019 in Delft!
September 2019: Mark Gotham is an invited scholar in the team during two weeks
May 2019: We welcome Gianluca Micchi, new post-doc in the team. He will work on Beethoven piano sonata and harmony analysis.
April 2019: Jules Cournut, master student, begins his master thesis in the team, in collaboration with Arobas Music. Welcome Jules !
September 2018: We present at ISMIR 2018 a paper on cadence detection and a poster on composer recognition.
May 2018: We present the Dezrann platform at TENOR 2018
2018: We organize this year the french-speaking JIM 2018 conference as well as seminars in computer music.

Our partners and funders

Algomus

🇫🇷 Algomus est l’équipe d’informatique musicale du laboratoire CRIStAL, à l’Université de Lille. Dans une démarche d’humanités numériques, l’équipe se concentre sur la modélisation de haut-niveau, l’analyse et la génération co-créative de musique, et enfin sur l’interaction avec les partitions et d’autres données musicales L’équipe mène également des travaux sur l’éthique des recherches en musique, que ce soit vis-à-vis de l’IA ou de la diversité des corpus musicaux.

Algomus collabore avec des musicien·nes, des enseignant·es, des artistes et des entreprises. La plateforme Dezrann pour le partage de l’analyse musicale est utilisée à la fois en recherche et en pédagogie (écoles de musique, éducation musicale en secondaire), aidant à réfléchir et à discuter de la musique tout en valorisant du patrimoine et du matrimoine musical. L’équipe contribue à des projets science&arts, arts&santé, à la médiation scientifique. Algomus publie ouvertement des méthodes, du code et des jeux de données.