Arpi Mardirossian

Research Interests

My research interests are in the area of Music Information Retrieval (MIR). My dissertation centers on methods for assessing and visualizing musical similarity. As the name implies, MIR is the interdisciplinary science of retrieving information from music. It incorporates methods for music perception and cognition, classification, clustering and databases. The recent rapid growth of digital music information has brought the computational tools developed for MIR to the forefront. My domain of interest lies in content-based MIR, the retrieval of music by content rather than by title, artist, band or composer. Name-that-tune is an example of retrieval by content. Another example might be the retrieval of all versions of a given song. It is not difficult to see that musical similarity plays a significant role in MIR systems. My goal is to find computational ways to accurately assess, quantify, and visualize the degree of similarity between two samples of music.

Between 2002 and 2007, I was a Research Assistant under the advisement of Prof. Elaine Chew. I was funded by a highly competitive NSF Information Technology Research Grant. I was also awarded a 2006-2007 Digital Dissertation Fellowship. The year-long fellowship is "designed to foster multimedia research that expands the potential of academic publication via emergent and transitional media," and is "awarded to students working on the development of a scholarly multimedia project related to their dissertation." Fellows are affiliated with the Institute for Multimedia Literacy in the School of Cinema-TV, and participate in colloquia, discussion groups, and presentations on scholarly multimedia.

Publications

Arpi Mardirossian. "Investigations in Music Similarity: Analysis, Organization, and Visualization using Tonal Features." Ph.D. dissertation. Industrial and Systems Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, 2007.

Arpi Mardirossian and Elaine Chew. "Visualizing Music: Tonal Progressions and Distributions." 8th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval, Vienna, Austria, September 23-27, 2007. [pdf]

Arpi Mardirossian and Elaine Chew. "Music Summarization Via Key Distributions: Analyses of Similarity Assessment Across Variations." 7th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, October 8-12, 2006. [pdf]

Arpi Mardirossian and Elaine Chew. "Key Distributions as Musical Fingerprints for Similarity Assessment." 1st IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Information Processing and Retrieval, Irvine, CA, December 12-14, 2005. [pdf]

Arpi Mardirossian and Elaine Chew. "SKeFiS -- a symbolic (MIDI) key-finding system." Extended abstract (3 pages). 1st Annual Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange, ISMIR 2005, London, UK, September 11-15, 2005. [pdf]

Arpi Mardirossian. "Pattern Theoretic Model of Square Dance Calling", B.A. thesis. Department of Mathematics, Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA, 1998.

Presentations

02.17.2007 Southern California Computing in Music (SCCiM) Inaugural Symposium, University of Southern California, Los Angeles CA - "Modeling Music's Look, Feel and Behavior". [Presentation]

02.07.2007 Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering Ph.D. Seminar, University of Southern California, Los Angeles CA - "Modeling Music's Look, Feel and Behavior". [Presentation]

10.11.2006 Seventh International Conference on Music Information Retrieval, Victoria, Canada - "Music Summarization Via Key Distributions: Analyses of Similarity Assessment Across Variations". [Presentation]

12.14.2005 First IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Information Processing and Retrieval, Irvine CA - "Key Distributions as Musical Fingerprints for Similarity Assessment". [Presentation]

11.30.2005 Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering Ph.D. Seminar, University of Southern California, Los Angeles CA - "Key Distributions as Musical Fingerprints for Similarity Assessment". [Presentation]

09.02.2005 Department of Mathematics, Occidental College, Los Angeles CA - I was invited for an informal question-and-answer session attended by both faculty and students of the department. The topic of focus was my current research as well as my experience since graduating from Occidental. [Presentation]

05.15.2005 4th Annual Institute of Industrial Engineers Doctoral Colloquium, Atlanta, GA - "The Rating Game - Methods for Evaluating Key Finding Algorithms". [Poster]

04.02.2004 Graduate and Professional Student Senate Interdisciplinary Conference, University of Southern California, Los Angeles CA - "A Hierarchical Description Tree and Similarity Measure for Content-Based Retrieval of Tonal Music". [Presentation & Poster]

09.16.2003 Graduate Technology Alliance Technical Exposition, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, Los Angeles CA - "A Hierarchical Description Tree and Similarity Measure for Content-Based Retrieval of Tonal Music". [Presentation]