All posts by Christos Plachouras

Christos Plachouras
10th February 2025

AIM at the RITMO Workshop on Music and AI

From 3rd to 5th March 2025, AIM researchers will participate in the RITMO Workshop on Music and AI. The event, hosted by the RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time, and Motion at the University of Oslo, brings together scholars from AIM, RITMO, and the MUSAiC project at KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

MUSAiC at KTH explores AI’s role in music through listening, composition, performance, and critique, aiming to develop human-AI partnerships. RITMO, a Centre of Excellence at the University of Oslo, investigates rhythm as a structuring mechanism in human life, drawing on expertise from musicology, psychology, and informatics.

The programme includes presentations from RITMO, KTH, and AIM/C4DM researchers, hands-on sessions and discussions on AI-driven music technologies, and a visit to RITMO’s facilities.

This event fosters interdisciplinary collaboration and strengthens connections between leading AI and music research institutions.

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Christos Plachouras
5th February 2025

AIM at AAAI 2025

AAAI conference logo and titleFrom the 25th February to 4th March 2025, two AIM researchers will participate at the 39th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2025), including the one day workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Music. AAAI is one of the leading conferences on artificial intelligence. This year AAAI will take place onsite in Philadelphia (PA, USA).

The following works were authored/coauthored by AIM PhD students and academic staff:

– “Text2MIDI: Generating Symbolic Music from Captions” by Keshav Bhandari, Abhinaba Roy, Kyra Wang, Geeta Puri, Simon Colton, and Dorien Herremans
– “Towards Music Industry 5.0: Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence” by Alexander Williams and Mathieu Barthet
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Christos Plachouras
8th November 2024

Melodious or distorted? How music reinforces gender stereotypes in kids’ toys commercials

Kids' toys on shelfThe music in toy commercials might be shaping how children see themselves and the world! A new study, published in PLOS ONE, from Queen Mary University of London reveals that sound in toy ads isn’t just background noise — it’s actively reinforcing gender stereotypes.

AIM PhD student Luca Marinelli, supervised by Dr Charalampos Saitis (C4DM – COMMA) and in collaboration with Prof Petra Lucht (Center for Interdisciplinary Women’s and Gender Studies at TU Berlin) found that ads targeting boys often feature intense, abrasive sounds, while those for girls use softer, harmonious music. These choices subtly reinforce ideas of “masculine” and “feminine” play from an early age.

Read more about the research and see the data firsthand:
https://www.qmul.ac.uk/media/news/2024/se/new-study-sheds-light-on-the-role-of-sound-and-music-in-gendered-toy-marketing.html

(image source and license details)

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