Lily Turner on Teaching a Machine to Play Like Mark O'Connor

Our guest for this episode of the Music at Pitt Podcast is Lily Turner, a freshly minted Pitt graduate from Blacksburg, Virginia. As a student at Pitt she was a double major in Computer Science and Music, specifically pursuing the Global and Popular Music track. Lily is particularly interested in machine learning and artificial intelligence. She’s previously done research into using convolutional neural networks for computational drug discovery and is now interested in applying machine learning to music. For her senior capstone project, Lily applied machine learning to replicate the playing style of renowned fiddler Mark O’Connor and summarized her findings in a paper titled, “Mark O’Connor Bot: Recurrent Neural Net Generation of Texas-Style Fiddling.”