Bio
Parag Chordia is the Head of the Music Intelligence Group at the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology (GTCMT). His research focuses on machine understanding and generation of music in order to develop technologies for musical self-expression. He is also interested in understanding the cognitive underpinnings of musical experience, and particularly the neural basis of musical emotion. Dr. Chordia's research is funded in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
He is currently the CTO of Khush, which develops intelligent music applications, including the popular reverse-karaoke iPhone application LaDiDa. LaDiDa was developed in order to help people with no musical training create songs using only their voice. The application uses artificial intelligence to analyze sung vocal tracks in real-time and automatically composes matching music. Users can sing into the iPhone, and LaDiDa will analyze the pitch and structure of the melody in order to generate a unique accompaniment.
Dr. Chordia received his PhD from Stanford University's CCRMA (Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics), and his BS in Applied Mathematics from Yale University. He completed his post-doctoral studies with Dr. David Huron at the Cognitive and Systematic Musicology Laboratory.
Dr. Chordia is an active performer of the sarod, a fretless, plucked instrument used in North Indian classical music. He is a disciple of one of the most revered sarod maestros of the 20th century, Pandit Buddhadev Das Gupta. He is also the founder of Bol Records, an Indian classical music label that has produced albums by many of the leading artists of Indian classical music.