About Me

    I'm a Ph.D. student at the Institute for Computational Perception @ JKU, working with Univ.-Prof. Gerhard Widmer.
    Previously a master's student from the Music Informatics Group at Georgia Tech, advised by Prof. Alexander Lerch, and a research assistant at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan, working with Dr. Yi-Hsuan Yang.
    My research focuses on computational methods for a better understanding of expressive performances, symbolic representaion, and the underlying emotions. I aim for machines to serve as a guide and tool for the comprehension of musical context within the field of music information retrieval and generation.


    #MIR    #Emotion Recognition    #Symbolic Representation

Publications

A Study on the Data Distribution Gap in Music Emotion Recognition
Joann Ching, Gerhard Widmer

Proceedings of the 17th International Symposium on Computer Music Multidisciplinary Research (CMMR). 2025.

paper   code
Language Models for Music Medicine Generation
Emmanouil Nikolakakis, Joann Ching, Emmanouil Karystinaios, Gabrielle Sipin, Gerhard Widmer, Razvan Marinescu

arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.09080. 2024.

paper   demo
BERT-like pre-training for symbolic piano music classification tasks
Yi-Hui Chou, I-Chun Chen, Chin-Jui Chang, Joann Ching, Yi-Hsuan Yang

Journal of Creative Music Systems. 2024.

paper   code
Learning to Generate Piano Music with Sustain Pedals
Joann Ching, Yi-Hsuan Yang

arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.01216. 2021.

paper   code
EMOPIA: A Multi-Modal Pop Piano Dataset For Emotion Recognition and Emotion-based Music Generation
Hsiao-Tzu Hung, Joann Ching, Seungheon Doh, Nabin Kim, Juhan Nam, Yi-Hsuan Yang

Proceedings of the 21st International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR). 2021.

paper   code
Source Separation-Based Data Augmentation Techniques for Improved Joint Beat and Downbeat Tracking In Classical Music
Ching-Yu Chiu, Joann Ching, Wen-Yi Hsiao, Yu-Hua Chen, Alvin Wen-Yu Su, Yi-Hsuan Yang

European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO). 2021.

paper   code
Instrument Role Classification: Auto-tagging for Loop Based Music
Joann Ching, Antonio Ramires, Yi-Hsuan Yang

Joint Conference on AI Music Creativity (CSMC+MuMe). 2020.

paper   code
The Freesound Loop Dataset and Annotation Tool
Antonio Ramires, Frederic Font, Dmitry Bogdanov, Jordan B. L. Smith, Yi-Hsuan Yang, Joann Ching, Bo-Yu Chen, Yueh-Kao Wu, Hsu Wei-Han, Xavier Serra

Proceedings of the 21st International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR). 2020.

paper   documentation

Work Experience

2024.5-2024.8
Machine Learning Engineer & Full Stack Developer
Melception

#Automatic Generation    #Full Stack Development

2022.6-2022.8
Research Intern
Pandora | SiriusXM

#Recommendation System    #Music Information Retrieval    #Data Analysis

2019.8-2021.8
Research Assistant
Academia Sinica

#Automatic Generation    #Music Emotion Recognition    #Loop Auto-tagging    #Composer Classification

Education

2024 - Now
Institute of Computational Perception, JKU Linz
Ph.D. in Computer Science

   Research Topic: Music Expressivity and Emotion Recognition

2021 - 2023
Georgia Institute of Technology
M.S. Music Technology

   Research Topic: Piano Sustain Pedal Recognition, Melody Extraction

   Related Courses: Audio Content Analysis, DSP, Music Perception & Cognition, Stat ML

2015 - 2019
The University of Texas at Austin
B.M. Music Performance

   Related Courses: Music Theory, Elements of Software Engineering, Data Science