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About MEL

The Music Experience Lab was formed in 2008 (fka Music Cognition Lab) by Richard Randall at Carnegie Mellon University with a focus on human auditory cognition. In 2011, Randall partnered with scholar Richard Purcell and CMU's Center for the Arts in Society to form the Listening Spaces Project —-a three-year initiative to examine how technological, political, and economic forces influence how we make music in the 21st century. The work of Listening Spaces prompted MEL to develop research programs around public music events, music as a good, and music labor/value relationships. Currently, MEL works with Romani musicians in the Balkans to promote Roma as important cultural producers and combat human rights abuses.

People

Rich Randall, Principal Investigator

I live in Pittsburgh, PA and work at Carnegie Mellon University. I spend part of my time answering fundamental questions about music and the human condition. I call this work the "Music Experience Lab," and I partner with people, institutions, and technologies to create new knowledge and transformational practices around music.

Past Research Assistant: C. Streuly, K. Blakely, M. Ly.

Global Sustainability Goals

MEL projects support the following United Nations Sustainable Development Goals:

Site by C. Streuly (2024)

Listening Spaces

Co-directed by Rich Purcell and Rich Randall

Since 2011, The Listening Spaces Project frames music as an essential human activity and seeks to understand the overwhelming impact technology has had on our collective and personal musical interactions. We are committed to understanding the porous boundary between music makers, listeners and users. Listening Spaces was established in 2011 at Carnegie Mellon University with funding from the Center for the Arts in Society's Media Initiative. Our work examines ways in which technological, political, and economic forces influence how we make music in the 21st century. We partner with scholars, technologists, critics, artists, musicians, and activists from Pittsburgh and around the world in order to create a stronger discourse about diverse music practices. In 2012, we hosted the Listening Spaces Symposium with scholars such as Larisa Mann, Trebor Scholz, and Jonathan Sterne.

THE MUSIC EXPERIENCE LAB

The Music Experience Lab (MEL) creates, investigates, and documents musical experiences across multiple domains. MEL operates within and beyond disciplinary boundaries to answer questions about what music is and why it is important to us. We are musicians, artists, scholars, and activists who understand music as a rhizomatic process of listening, performing, and providing. Our projects range from one-time experiences to complex multi-year research programs resulting in deliverables such as publications, recordings, grants, public events, concerts, conferences, and music festivals.

LISTENING

Listening is the perceptual foundation for the complex social activity we call music. Listening also describes empathetic intercultural engagements, persistent digital surveillance, machine learning, and even neuroimaging techniques. "Who listens and what do they hear?" are research questions that require multiple modes of inquiry to answer. This area organizes MEL's work in psychology, technology, and cultural and media studies into three themes: Cultural Listening, Perceptual Listening, and Machine Listening.

Abdi Suljumanov

Zurladjia from Stumica

Suares Sali

Tapanjia from Veles

Samir Kurtov

Zurladjia from Petrich

CULTURAL LISTENING

Romani Drummers Project

This project documents, preserves, and celebrates the rich tradition of zurla and tapan performance in North Macedonia. The study examines the significance of zurla and tapan in the daily lives of Romani musicians. It draws attention to the ever-evolving musical landscape, where genres like tallava have become integral to Romani celebrations. This project seeks to develop positive Romani representations by promoting their heritage as the traditional performers of these instruments.

Here are interviews with three Romani musicians discussing their history and connection to this tradition. The interviews are from a festival we organized in Ratevo, North Macedonia in 2022. The full video of the festival can be found in the Providing section.



Additional Work

2016 Purcell, R. and R. Randall, Eds. 21st Century Perspectives on Music, Technology, and Culture: Listening Spaces. Palgrave Macmillan (Basingstoke, UK)

2013 Randall, R. Torture and Punishment Through Music. In J. Edmondson. Music in American Life. (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood).

PERCEPTUAL LISTENING

2023 Gurariy, G., R. Randall and A. S. Greenberg. Neuroimaging Evidence for the Direct Role of Auditory Scene Analysis in Object Perception. Cerebral Cortex, 33(10), 6257-6272. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhac501

2021 Gurariy, G., R. Randall and A. S. Greenberg. Manipulation of Low-level Features Modulates Grouping Strength of Auditory Objects. Psychological Research, 85(6), 2256-2270. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-020-01391-4

2016 Randall, R. and A. S. Greenberg. Principal Components Analysis of the Perception of Musicality in Pitch Sequences. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, 112-118. https://doi.org/10.1184/R1/7121654.v1

2012 Randall, R, G. Sudre, Y. Xu, A. B. Bagic. Effects of Short-Term Experience on Music-Related ERAN Responses. In (Eds) E. Cambouropoulos, C. Tsourgas, P. Mavromatis, C. Pastiadis. Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition and European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music, 839-840.

MACHINE LISTENING

2022 McNeal, N. J. Huang, A. Umoren, S. Dai, R. Dannenberg, R. Randall, and T.S. Lee. Relating Human Perception of Musicality to Prediction in a Predictive Coding Model. arXiv preprint ar-Xiv:2210.16587

2017 Randall, R. Musical Affordance and the MP3. Boundary 2, 44(2), 127–143. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-3826654

2016 Randall, R. and I-T. Liu. Predicting Missing Music Components with Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Neural Networks. In Proceedings of the 17th International Society on Music Information Retrieval Conference, 225-231.

2016 Randall, R. A Case for Musical Privacy. In (Eds.) R. Purcell and R. Randall. 21st Century Perspectives on Music, Technology, and Culture: Listening Spaces (pp. 120-133). Palgrave Macmillan.

PERFORMING

Performing is the act of creating musical experiences for ourselves and others. Performing music for others is how musical culture is made. The context of performance (why, where, for whom?) is as crucial to this process as the sounds made by musicians. MEL uses performance to promote music as a social practice that embodies connection and storytelling.

Bombici

Formed in 2017, Bombici is an experimental electroacoustic collective that explores form and improvisation through Western and non-Western musical practices. They have performed in various configurations in concert halls, radical music festivals, punk bars, and on street corners. Bombici are pioneers of real-time live sound processing to create powerful augmented musical realities. Inspired by artists like Sun Ra, Lee "Scratch" Perry, and Glenn Branca, Bombici forges a path into new sonic frontiers. Percussionist and founder Rich Randall works closely with Romani musicians in the US and Macedonia. Bombici’s music is an evolving conversation with Roma about their cultural capital amidst constant oppression.

"Live at Studio B" (Adhyaropa Records, November 2024), is a live concert film and full-length album recorded in July 2023 in front of a studio audience. Recorded in a single take at WQED in Pittsburgh, PA, it is the culmination of 6 years of genre-defying live performances and experimentation. The group uses the emergent musicality of improvisation to create compelling musical landscapes. With electronic processing on all instruments, Bombici creates an extraordinary sonic mosaic and invites listeners to suspend their musical expectations. The album showcases the formidable talent of saxophonists Ben Opie and Patrick Breiner, guitarist Colter Harper, and electronic musician Jesse Stiles, backed by bassist Ryan McMasters and percussionists Rich Randall and Jonathan Heins. Their repertoire draws from global folk and pop music interpreted through American jazz and rock traditions. They’re known for expertly navigating the unfamiliar time signatures of Balkan folk songs and dances in a style that sometimes nods to New York’s late-70s no-wave scene and other times evinces tenderness and care. The album's first single “Harmattan” transcends its Ghanaian funereal roots to become a visionary statement of hope and progress. The concert film is produced and directed by electronic musician and artist Jesse Stiles with cinematography and VFX by multimedia artist Scott Andrew. The film is available on Youtube at HERE.

Young Musicians Collaborative

The Young Musicians Collaborative (YMC) was an in-school educational program developed and directed by Rich Randall from 2015 to 2016. The program served students at the Pittsburgh Public Milliones 6-12 School in the Hill District neighborhood. The goals of the Young Musicians Collaborative were to offer music-centered, connected learning opportunities for the young people of underserved neighborhoods in Pittsburgh and to expand their involvement in public and civic activities and spaces.

Specifically, the educational goals of the YMC were:
1) Enhance Personal Growth: development of self, increased confidence, and empowerment,
2) Develop Group Skills: team building and peer-based learning, and
3) Stimulate Community Engagement: experiencing the role of music in social engagement, relationship building, network creation, and community investment.

The YMC achieved these goals by connecting youth participants with established music practitioners and facilitating a series of workshops (both inside and outside the classroom) that educated and empowered. We demonstrated the connection between music performance and everyday issues, encouraging participants to investigate what matters to them and how to express that when performing. This project received financial support from the Fine Foundation (2015) and the Sprout Fund (2016).

PROVIDING

Providing the means of production guides listening and performing toward social outcomes. This is one of the most influential aspects of musical labor as it determines who can be heard and who is allowed to hear them. The good produced by musical labor is the experience and the social affordances it engenders. MEL has explored this idea on multiple scales—from public music festivals drawing thousands of participants to educational programs promoting public performance. MEL is committed to providing music as both a public good and a means of personal expression. Below are descriptions of MEL projects in this area.

Meeting of the Zurladji

Organized in the village of Ratevo in the Malesevski region of North Macedonia in 2022, The Meeting of the Zurladji celebrated the rich tradition of zurla and tapan music and the Romani families that perform it.

Pittonkatonk

Pittonkatonk was created in 2014 from a dialogue on how musical labor and music as a commodity shape social relationships and music practices in capitalist society. By promoting music as a social practice that brings people together to develop positive individual and social identities, Pittonkatonk created spaces around Pittsburgh where the audience and musicians achieve important collective identities, celebrate diversity, and collaboratively work for common goals.

Pittonkatonk was made possible through non-profit grants, donations, and volunteerism, and in each of these four years, the project was fiscally solvent. There was no admission fee, no corporate sponsors, nothing was for sale, and every musician was paid for performing.

It was a potluck event where people brought food, drink, music, dancing, and the desire to come together to celebrate what music and community really can be. For four years (2014-2017), Pittonkatonk successfully resisted commercialization and created a transgressive space of musical and political action.

During this time, attendance at the May Day event grew from around one hundred to a few thousand participants. We connected people with national and local musicians, activists, and educators to empower them to use their love of music to engage the world around them. You can read about what Pittonkatonk was about and what we accomplished in:

2020 Randall, R. “Pittonkatonk and Valuing Music as a Public Good.” In (Eds.) R. Garafolo, E. Allen, A. Snyder. HONK!: Mapping a Street Band Renaissance (pp. 199-211). Rutledge.

Balkan Music and Culture: Sounds of Past and Present

In 2018, we organized a symposium to discuss how ethnic, gender, class, and national identities intersect to create dynamic musical practices in the Balkans. Featured speakers include Slovenian ethnomusicologist Ana Hofman, anthropologist and dance leader Alex Marković, Macedonian Rom choreographer Milo Destanovski, and clarinetist Jessica Ruiz. The program continued with KAFANA PGH, a Balkan dance party at Los Sabrosos Dance Co in Garfield with the Pitt Carpathian Ensemble. Performances featured traditional Macedonian Zurla/Tapan music, Balkan dances, and electroacoustic sounds by the local ensemble Bombici. Attendees were invited to join in improvisations and singalongs.

Music and Labor Roundtable

The 2014 and 2017 Music and Labor Public Roundtables were organized to discuss a number of issues: being a working musician, how music has been used in labor movements, the roles race and economy play in how musical communities survive, the past and present traditions of making music, D.I.Y practices, and how technology can help or hurt musicians. All were discussed from the perspective of being in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We aimed to create solidarity and understanding about how we do the work we do. The panel of local musicians and activists engaged with audience participants to understand the material conditions in which music-making can occur, the work involved in making music, and the market value of that work.