The AHRC-funded research project that I am a part of, Transforming Musicology, is recruiting a developer for a short-term contract, primarily to work with me on database systems for multimedia (primarily audio) content. The goal for that primary part of the contract is to take some existing work on audio feature extraction and probabilistic nearest-neighbour search indexing, and to develop a means for specialist users (e.g. musicologists, librarians, archivists, musicians) to access the functionality without needing to be experts in the database domain. This of course will involve thinking about user interfaces, but also about distributed computation, separation of data and query location, and so on.

The funding is for six months of programmer time. I would have no objection to someone working for six months in a concentrated block of time; I would also have no objection to stretching the funding out over a longer period of calendar time: it might well provide more time for reflection and a better outcome in the end. I would expect the development activities to be exploratory as well as derived from a specification; to span between the systems and the interface layer; to be somewhat polyglot (we have a C++ library, bindings in Python, Common Lisp and Haskell, and prototype Javascript and Emacs front-ends – no applicant is required to be fluent in all of these!)

There are some potentially fun opportunities during the course of the contract, not least working with the rest of the Transforming Musicology team. The post is based at Goldsmiths, and locally we have some people working on Systems for Early Music, on Musicology and Social Networking, and on Musical Memory; the Goldsmiths contribution is part of a wider effort, with partners based at Oxford working on Wagnerian Leitmotif and on a Semantic Infrastructure, at Queen Mary working on mid-level representations of music, and in Lancaster coordinating multiple smaller projects. As well as these opportunities for collaboration, there are a number of events coming up: firstly, the team would hope to have a significant presence at the conference of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval, which will be held in Málaga in October. We don’t yet know what we will be submitting there (let alone what will be accepted!) but there should be an opportunity to travel there, all being well. In July we’ll be participating in the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School, leading a week-long programme of workshops and lectures on digital methods for musicology. Also, in November of 2014, we also participated in the AHRC’s “Being Human” festival, with a crazy effort to monitor participants’ physiological responses to Wagner opera; there’s every possibility that we will be invited to contribute to a similar event this year. And there are other, similar projects in London with whom we have friendly relations, not least the Digital Music Lab project at City University and the EU-funded PRAISE project at Goldsmiths.

Sound interesting? Want to apply? There’s a more formal job advert on the project site, while the “person specification” and other application-related materials is with Goldsmiths HR. The closing date for applications is the 27th March; we’d hope to interview shortly after that, and to have the developer working with us from some time in May or June. Please apply!