Hello!

I’m Huw, and I’m a PhD student in Music Information Retrieval at the Centre for Music and Science, University of Cambridge. I’m interested in what large-scale computer modelling, data analysis, and artificial intelligence can teach us about the ways in which humans create, understand, and engage with music and art. During my PhD, I have undertaken research internships in Spotify’s Audio Intelligence lab and published articles in Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval, Music Perception and Royal Society Open Science.

Research

I use large-scale quantitative and computational methods to investigate systems of production and classification in music: how people make music, and how the music that they make can best be understood. Most of my previous work has focussed on improvised music, especially jazz, where I have written on subjects including performer identification, style classification, and action coordination. This work has drawn on techniques from music information retrieval, audio signal processing, machine learning, data science, and corpus analysis. I am also interested in drawing from these fields to develop reusable technologies and datasets that can be deployed by researchers across a broad variety of domains relating to music and audio. To find our more about my work, check out my publications and talks.

My PhD research is supported by a Vice-Chancellor’s award from the Cambridge Trust. Individual projects completed during my PhD have been sponsored by awards and grants from Cambridge Digital Humanities, Music & Letters Trust, and the Royal Musical Association.

Background

I received my master’s and undergraduate degrees from the Faculty of Music at Oxford University, where I graduated from both programmes with the highest mark in my cohort. My postgraduate study was fully-funded by a graduate scholarship from Linacre College, Oxford. In between my master’s and PhD, I taught for a year in the music department at Kingswood School, Bath. Click here to read my full CV.

Music

Alongside my academic work, I have worked sporadically as a musician (guitar, bass, and electronics) and sound recordist. I’ve typically worked in either contemporary classical or jazz styles, but am comfortable within most notated and improvised settings.

As a performer, I’ve been lucky to work with acts including Clean Bandit, Everything Everything, and with members of Fires of London and Dinosaur. Projects I’ve worked on have variously been funded by Sound and Music and Arts Council England. You can listen to some of my playing on several of the recordings released by JazzSoc Records, a record label I co-founded in 2020 while a student at Oxford. In the past, I’ve studied guitar with Chris Montague and Stuart Ryan, and improvisation with Jason Rebello and John Law.

My audio production showreel can be found on YouTube. Finally, I also maintain the blog WallpaperJazz, which contains my own transcriptions of various jazz improvisations and recordings.

_{(I can also be heard playing guitar on this viral TikTok…)}