Eamonn Bell

Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
Durham University
ORCID (0000-0002-9211-5192)
Google Scholar

Employment

Durham University

• (2021–) Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science [staff profile]

Trinity College Dublin

• (2019–2021) Research Fellow, Department of Music [staff profile]
  • Project: Opening the “Red Book”: The digital Audio CD format from the viewpoint between musicology and media studies. This two-year project explores how the once-ubiquitous Compact Disc (CD) audio format was designed, subverted, reproduced and domesticated for musical ends. It is supported by a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship, awarded by the Irish Research Council in 2019.

Education

Columbia University

• (2019) Ph.D. Music Theory.
  • Doctoral dissertation: “The Computational Attitude in Music Theory" (advisor: Prof. Joseph Dubiel) [open access (institutional repo) 🔓]
• (2017) M.Phil Music Theory
• (2015) M.A. Music Theory

Trinity College Dublin

• (2013) B.A. (Mod.) Music and Mathematics (Styled M.A. (Dubl.) as of April 2020)

Publications

• Eamonn Bell, “Exploring Time-Coded Comments on YouTube Music Videos of ‘Top 40’ Pop 2000–20,” in YouTube and Music: Online Culture and Everyday Life, ed. Holly Rogers, Joana Freitas, and João Francisco Porfírio, New Approaches to Sound, Music, and Media (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), 225–76. [open access (publisher) 🔓] [open access (institutional repo)] [doi]
• Maria Niarchou, Daniel E. Gustavson, J. Fah Sathirapongsasuti, Manuel Anglada-Tort, Else Eising, Eamonn Bell, Evonne McArthur, Peter Straub, The 23andMe Research Team, J. Devin McAuley, John A. Capra, Fredrik Ullén, Nicole Creanza, Miriam A. Mosing, David Hinds, Lea K. Davis, Nori Jacoby, Reyna L. Gordon, “Genome-wide association study of musical beat synchronization demonstrates high polygenicity.” Nature Human Behaviour [doi] [bioRxiv]
• Eamonn Bell, “Cybernetics, listening, and sound-studio phenomenotechnique in Abraham Moles’s Théorie de l’information et perception esthétique (1958).” Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture 2(4), special issue on Music and Cybernetics in Historical Perspective, 2021. [doi] [pre-print (AAM)] 🔓
• Eamonn Bell, “Interleaving as cultural technique in the Audio CD and the end of archaeophonography” in Media Theory 5(1), 2021. [open access 🔓] [preview (blog post) 🔓]
• Eamonn Bell, “Hacking Jeff Minter’s Virtual Light Machine: Unpacking the code and community behind an early software-based music visualizer” in Volume!: La revue des musiques populaires 16(1), Special issue on Music and Hacking, 2019. [publisher link] [pre-print (institutional repo) 🔓] [full open access (from 1/2023) 🔓]
• Eamonn Bell and Laurent Pugin, “Learning to extract handwritten annotations from digitized images of musical scores,” in International Journal on Digital Libraries, Special issue on Digital Libraries for Musicology, 2018. [publisher free-to-view link 🔓] [doi]

Forthcoming

• Eamonn Bell, “Choosing, using, and building effective software tools for research with symbolic music corpora” in The Oxford Handbook of Music and Corpus Studies. Edited by Daniel Shanahan, Ashley Burgoyne, and Ian Quinn. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Podcast/Radio

As Guest

• Interview for Field Day Podcast. (prod. Cormac Deane). Episode 30. “The Compact Disc at 40, a media history with Eamonn Bell”. 26 August 2020.

As Host

• Interview with Ben Steege, author of An Unnatural Attitude: Phenomenology in Weimar Musical Thought for New Books Network (ed. Marshall Poe)/New Books in Music. 7 July 2021. [podcast]
• Interview with Makis Solomos, author of From Music to Sound: The Emergence of Sound in 20th and 21st-century Music (2019) for New Books Network (ed. Marshall Poe)/New Books in Music. 21 May 2021. [podcast]
• Interview with Gascia Ouzounian, author of Stereophonica: Sound and Space in Science, Technology, and the Arts (2021) for New Books Network (ed. Marshall Poe)/New Books in Music. 16 March 2021. [podcast]
• Interview with Mack Hagood, author of Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control (2019) for New Books Network (ed. Marshall Poe)/New Books in Music. 12 August 2020. [podcast]
• Interview with Rachel Mundy, author of Animal Musicalities: Birds, Beasts, and Evolutionary Listening (2018) for New Books Network (ed. Marshall Poe)/New Books in Music. 7 July 2020. [podcast]
• Interview with Nick Prior, author of Popular Music, Digital Technology and Society (2018) for New Books Network (ed. Marshall Poe)/New Books in Music. 18 May 2020. [podcast]
• Interview with Thor Magnusson, author of Sonic Writing: Technologies of Material, Symbolic, and Signal Inscriptions (2019) for New Books Network (ed. Marshall Poe)/New Books in Music. 15 April 2020. [podcast]

Presentations

• “Looking back to move forward: the pre-histories of Music Information Retrieval.” AI and Human Systems (AIHS) Group Seminar, Department of Computer Science, Durham University. 26 May 2022. [video]
• “Cybernetics, listening, and sound-studio phenomenotechnique in Abraham Moles’s Théorie de l’information et perception esthétique (1958).” Roundtable on Music and Cybernetics at Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Online. 21 November 2021.
• “Two musical episodes at the piano keyboard in the study of human information-processing: Information as ‘cognitive good’ in interdisciplinary research.” Panel on Human-Computer Entanglements: Psychology, Computing, and Artificial Intelligence in the 20th Century at 2021 Meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science, Toronto, ON. 6–9 October 2021.
• “The decline and fall of The Voyager Company’s CDLink platform: confronting digital ruin in the Web history of late-twentieth century digital audio media” at Information Overload? Music Studies in the Age of Abundance, University of Birmingham, UK. 8–10 September 2021.
• “The test-disc cultures of the audio compact disc (CD) format” at Sound Instruments and Sonic Cultures: An Interdisciplinary Conference, Bradford, UK. December 14–18 2020. [talk outline]
• “[On fugues and functionalism]” at Community Research Seminar event on AI and music at the Mellon Sawyer Seminar “Histories of AI: A Genealogy of Power” at the University of Cambridge/online. 20 November 2020. [talk outline]
• “Subverting algorithmic policies of sonic control in Nicolas Collins’s Broken Light (1992)” at Joint Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory (AMS/SMT), Minneapolis, MN. (November 5–8 2020). Also delivered at 18th Annual Society for Musicology in Ireland Plenary Conference. University College Dublin School of Music, Dublin, Ireland. 25–27 June 2020. 29–31 October 2020. [slides, video, and outline]
• “Exploring time-coded comments on YouTube music videos: The past, present, and future of an emerging source for digital musicology” at Like, share and subscribe: Youtube, music and cyberculture before and after the new decade. Research Cluster in Music and Cyberculture (CysMus). Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas - NOVA FCSH, Lisbon, Portugal. 1–3 October 2020. [slides, video, and outline]
• “Reanimating the CDLink platform: A challenge for the preservation of mid-1990s Web-based interactive media and net.art” at Engaging with Web Archives: Opportunities, Challenges and Potentialities (#EWA20), Maynooth University. 15–16 April 2020. 21—22 September 2020. [slides, video, and outline]
• “Format fractures in media-focused sound art spanning the analog/digital divide”, lunchtime talk for students in the Masters in Music and Media Technology (MMT) degree program at Stack B, Trinity College Dublin. 2 February 2020. [slides]
• “‘Cracked’ CDs, ‘hotwired’ players and the sounds of format failure in Nicolas Collins’s Broken Light (1992)” at Department of Music Research Colloquium, Trinity College Dublin. 11 February 2020.
• “Opening the ‘Red Book’: The digital Audio CD format from the viewpoint between musicology and media studies” at School of Creative Arts Research Forum, Trinity College Dublin. 10 February 2020. [recording]
• “Abraham Moles Redux: Théorie de l’information et perception esthétique (1958) and Its Sources” at Recursions: Music and Cybernetics in Historical Perspective, University of Edinburgh, Scotland. 24–25 October 2019.
• “Information theory at the keyboard: Henry Quastler’s ‘Studies of Human Channel Capacity’ (1956)” at Computational Auditory Perception Research Group, Max-Planck-Institut für empirische Ästhetik, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. 22 January 2019. [abstract] [talk outline]
• “Designing incentives for crowdworker collection of a ground-truth dataset for use in score-image annotation tasks” at SIMSSA workshop XVII: Infrastructure for music discovery, CIRMMT, McGill University, Montréal, QC. 1 December 2018.
• “‘Syntax-Based Analytic Reading of Musical Scores’: Music theory at the MIT AI Group 1965 to 1968” SIGCIS 2018, St. Louis, MO. 14 October 2018.
• “Active listening and the appropriation of high technology: A close reading of Jeff Minter’s interactive audio visualizer, The Virtual Light Machine”, Music and the Moving Image 2018, NYU Steinhardt. 26–28 May 2018.
• “Forms as algorithms: The case of the ‘normal form’”, Sound and Sonorities: Form and Forms in Music, Buffalo State College (SUNY Buffalo State). 27 April 2018. [talk outline]
• “‘A Viennese May Breeze’: Twelve-tone theory and the machine”, Music Theory Society of New York State Annual Conference 2018, Hunter College, CUNY. 14–15 April 2018. [handout] [slides]
• “Hacking music, matter, and mind in Jeff Minter’s Virtual Light Machine” at Music and Hacking: Instruments, Communities, Values, Musée du Quai Branly, Paris. 8–9 November 2017.
• “Seeing ear to ear: lessons from music visualization” at history of visualization / visualization in history, Studio@Butler, Columbia University. 8 April 2017.
• Eamonn Bell and Laurent Pugin, “Approaches to handwritten conductor annotation extraction in musical scores” at Digital Libraries for Musicology Workshop 2016, New York, NY. 12 August 2016. [proceedings] [slides]
• Eamonn Bell and Jaan Altosaar, “Applications of Word Embedding Models to a Classical Music Corpus: Stylistic Analysis and Composer Classification” at Machine Learning for Music Discovery Workshop, International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2016, New York, NY. 23 June 2016. [paper] [slides]

Teaching

Durham University

• (2023/2024) Introduction to Music Processing (new L3 module)
• (2022/2023) Lab instructor, Software Engineering (COMP 2281)
• (Michaelmas 2022) Lecturer, Algorithms and Data Structures, Part I (COMP 1081)
• (2021/2022) Lab instructor, Software Engineering (COMP 2281)

Columbia University (New York, NY)

• (Spring 2019) Teaching Assistant, Theory I (Prof. Ben Steege)
• (Fall 2018) Instructor, Techniques and Tools for the Critique of Digital Music
  • This course was facilitated by the GSAS Teaching Scholars program.
• (Spring 2017) Instructor, Masterpieces of Western Music (Music Humanities) (M/W, 8:40a.m.-9:55a.m., 405 Dodge)
• (Fall 2016) Instructor, Fundamentals of Music (Tu/Th, 4:10p.m.-5:25p.m., 814 Dodge)
• (Spring 2016) Teaching Assistant, Masterpieces of Western Music (Dr. Edgardo Salinas)
• (Fall 2015) Teaching Assistant/Grader, Salsa/Soca/Reggae (Prof. Chris Washburne)
• (Spring 2015) Teaching Assistant, Theory IV (Prof. Ellie Hisama)
• (Fall 2014) Teaching Assistant, Theory III (Prof. Ellie Hisama)

Other activities

• (July 2021) Attended History of Captialism Summer Camp 2021, Cornell University/online
• (Fall 2018) Co-convener (with Katy Gero), “Making Art in an Age of Algorithms” interdisciplinary reading group (Sponsored by the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University)
• (Spring 2018–Spring 2019) Founding convener, GradMusWIP
• (January 2018) Attended NEMISIG 2018
• (January 2018) Participant, FAB-Musiconis (Paris, France and New York)
• (November 2017) Participant, Music Hack Day @ IRCAM
• (July 2017) Attended 7th Lisbon Machine Learning Summer School, 2017
• (June 2017) Participant, International Summer School, “Music, Language and Cognition” (Lake Como School of Advanced Studies, Como, Italy)
• (Spring 2017) Conference co-chair, Columbia Music Scholarship Conference 2017
• (2016/17) Reviews Editor (Issue 98), Current Musicology
• (Fall 2015/Spring 2016) Columbia University Libraries Digital Centers Internship Program under Jennifer Brown at the Science and Engineering Library
• (7 April 2016) Led “3D Data Visualization from Scratch with Processing” workshop at The Art of Data Visualization, Columbia University Libraries [event page] [workshop materials]
• (March 2016) Participant, Culture Analytics Beyond Text: Image, music, video, interactivity, and performance (Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA)

Print design

• Conference program, Women Music Power (2015) [pdf]
• Conference program, Current Musicology 50th Anniversary Conference (2015) [pdf]
• Conference program, Columbia Music Scholarship Conference 2014 [pdf]
• Student journal, Writings About Music (Trinity College Dublin), 1/1 (2012) [pdf]

Writeups

• Universität Bielefeld/idw Nachrichten, “Wie KI unser Denken über Musik verändert” (20 April 2023) [live]
• Center for Science and Society, “Seed Grant Spotlight: Eamonn Bell and Katy Ilonka Gero” (11 October 2018) [live]
• Columbia Spectator, “Early Music conference strives to preserve tradition in digital age” (23 October 2014) [live] [archive] (with Russell O’Rourke)
• thejournal.ie, “This great infographic explains how TDs use Twitter” (30 July 2013) [live] [archive] Other outlets: [siliconrepublic.ie] [sluggerotoole.com]