Can machine learning algorithms be trained to recognise beauty in music? To what extent is human recognition of beauty in music cultural, or crosscultural? Music is prevalent in all human cultures. Music information retrieval is a growing field in which computational techniques have been applied to many musical problems such as genre recognition and measuring musical similarity. Computational e...

Despite the size and growth of political science and sociology relative to other disciplines, political science and sociology graduate students have received a declining share of funding for dissertation field research in recent years. Specifically, political science and sociology students are losing out to competitive applicants from humanities-oriented fields that provide strong training in a...

Understanding cross-cultural patterns of musical diversity requires some method of visualizing these patterns using maps. The traditional methods of cross-cultural comparison have been criticized for ignoring the rich diversity of musical styles that exists within each culture. We present a compromise solution in which we map the relative frequencies of different “cantogroups” (stylistic song-t...

Paul Ballam-Cross is a writer, composer, and classical guitarist. He has completed BA in music performance, majoring guitar, Ph.D. musicology. regular reviewer for Limelight Magazine Australia casual lecturer at the University of Queensland. His research interests include exploring transcriptions guitar methods used creating them, as well multitude intersections between popular internet.Nomi Da...