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Dr Charalampos Saitis

Charalampos

Lecturer in Digital Music Processing

Email: c.saitis@qmul.ac.uk
Room Number: Engineering, Eng 111
Twitter: @noindent

Profile

I am based at the Centre for Digital Music (C4DM), one of the world’s largest music and acoustic technology research groups. Within C4DM I lead the Communication Acoustics Lab, where we conduct cutting-edge research into the ways people perceive sound and technologies for improving communication. This involves using empirical and computational methods to understand different modalities of experience, interaction, and control between the digital music “user” (listeners, performers, producers) and sound as a multimodal semiotic system.

My research focuses on cognitive representations of timbre and metaphor, including digital interactive cross-sensory games for public engagement and in-the-wild collection of behavioural data. I am a founding member of the International Conference on Timbre and acted as co-editor for the scientific volumes Timbre: Acoustics, Perception, & Cognition (2019) and Musical Haptics (2018). I am also interested in data-driven approaches to modelling human values (and biases) using multimodal music data (Turing Fellow 2021–2023).

My CV and publication list can be found here: Charalampos Saitis CV (updated January 2023)
My publications can also be found on my Google Scholar profile.

I am a member of the EECS Equalities Committee and the QMUL Racial Equality Action Group, and Chair of the EECS Devolved School Research Ethics Committee. 

Teaching

Interactive Digital Multimedia Techniques (Postgraduate)

This is a Master's level course in developing real-time interactive digital media systems. The course will focus on graphics and sound programming, with a secondary emphasis on basic electronic hardware design for sensors and human-computer interfaces. The course will employ widely-used development environments including Arduino, Processing Max/MSP and Jitter, Processing. Course material will be delivered through a combination of lectures, interactive lab sessions, and individual/group exercises (both in and out of class). Generally speaking, each class period will consist of a combination of lecture and interactive lab session.

Professional and Research Practice (Undergraduate)

This module provides you with the opportunity to examine the role of engineering in society and the expectations of society for a professional engineer. During the module, you should develop and achieve a level of written and spoken communication expected of a professional engineer. You will also construct a personal development plan (PDP) and an on-going employability skills folder. The assessment of the module is 100 per cent coursework, broken down as follows: oral presentation: 25 per cent; in-class essay: 25 per cent; PDP folder: 25 per cent; employability folder: 25 per cent. Not open to Associate Students or students from other departments.

Electronic Engineering Mathematics 2 (Undergraduate)

This module covers topics in engineering mathematics relevant to Electronics and Electrical Engineering programs: Vector Calculus (field theory, surface and volume integration, field operators), linear algebra (matrices and matrix operations, applications to systems of equations, reduced Row Echelon Form, determinants, Cramer's rule, eigenvalues and eigenvectors), differential equations (solving first and second order DEs).

Research

Research Interests:

  • Perception, cognition & aesthetics of sound
  • Crossmodal & multisensory perception involving sound
  • Enabling digital audio with an understanding of how we listen
  • Modelling human values (& biases) with digital music data
  • Digital tools for education, outreach, & research

PhD students:

  • Luca Marinelli: Gender-coded sound: A multimodal data-driven analysis of gender encoding strategies in sound and music for advertising (09/2020–current)
  • Ben Hayes: Perceptually Motivated Deep Learning Approaches to Creative Sound Synthesis (09/2020–current, co-supervised with George Fazekas)
  • Vjosa Preniqi: Predicting psychological traits from digital media behaviours (01/2021–current, co-supervised with Kyriaki Kalimeri)
  • Bleiz Del Sette: The Sound of Care: researching the use of deep learning and sonification for the daily support of people with chronic pain (09/2021–current)
  • Remi Falowo: E-AIM: Embodied Cognition in Intelligent Musical Emotion Systems (09/2021–current)
  • Maryam Fayaz Torshizi: Music mood modelling using Knowledge Graphs and Graph Neural Nets (09/2021–current, co-supervised with George Fazekas)
  • Jincheng Zhang: Controllable music generation using deep learning (09/2021–current, co-supervised with George Fazekas)
  • Jordie Shier: Real-time timbral mapping for synthesized percussive performance (09/2022-current, co-supervised with Andrew McPherson, collaboration with Ableton)
  • Chengye Wu: Metaphors we share: Leveraging cross-sensory associations in communication (09/2022-current)

Collaborators:

I'm pleased to be working with some great people across different research fields. This includes researchers in my home group the Centre for Digital Music, plus QMUL colleague Martin Benning (Mathematics). Outside QMUL, collaborators include Christine Cuskley (Newcastle, UK), Kyriaki Kalimeri (Fondazione ISI, Turin, Italy), Kai Siedenburg (Oldenburg, Germany), and Zachary Wallmark (Oregon, USA).

 

Publications

Supervision

Current PhD funding opportunities for September 2023 entry include:

  • AIM studentships for PhD in Artificial Intelligence and Music (opening date: November 2022; deadline: end January 2023)

Applicants are encouraged to contact me before submitting their application – please send an email with your CV and draft research proposal. Suggested PhD topics include:

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