Algomus

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. 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 to help children to think and to talk about music. 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

Vanessa Nina Borsan (PhD student, CRIStAL)
Louis Couturier (PhD student, MIS)
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)
Francesco Maccarini (PhD student, CRIStAL)
Yann Teytaut (Associate professor, CRIStAL)
Patrice Thibaud (PhD student and associate lecturer, Univ. Lille)
Rui Yang (PhD student from Oct 2024, CRIStAL)

Collaborators

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

2024 Internships

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

Past staff members and students

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)
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