Hi! I’m Jordan and I’m a lecturer and research at Queen Mary University of London specialising in Computer Science and Music.

I teach within Queen Mary School Hainan, which means I make four 2-week trips to China per year to give lectures. In Fall 2024, I developed and delivered a new module on Introduction to Digital Audio; in Spring 2025, I am updating and delivering a module on Introduction to Data Science Programming.

I like to build tools or interfaces for playing with music—like Unmixer, a website for extracting and remixing loops; or the CrossSong puzzle, a logic puzzle that requires careful listening to solve.

I also like trying to make it possible for computers to solve problems of music analysis or music theory—e.g., analysing the internal structure of a piece of music, or deciding whether one song is a cover, remix, or live rendition of another.

Previous work

I worked for TikTok for 4 years, on a team devoted to building algorithms and interfaces for music creation. Before that, I was a post-doctoral researcher for 3 years at AIST Japan in Tsukuba and for one year at IRCAM in Paris.

Research interests

Music structure! I find the way that listeners form an understanding of the internal structure of a piece of music to be fascinating, and I’ve been trying to understand it better from the start of my academic career. Some find this problem very abstract, but I think this is a sign of its deep connection to other topics, like pattern recognition and the perception of Gestalts.

I am also interested in:

• Music decomposition (e.g., into source loops)
• Tools for music composition (I refuse to call such tools “AI” — whatever steps they automate, they should be regarded as tools!)
• Music interfaces
• Experiment design

For non-work interests, check out the Puzzles tab, the Tumblr blog, or the Wordpress blog.