Ash Vinay is teaching machines to hear music the way humans do. A Ph.D. student, Vinay creates music through traditional means and by improvising music in real-time through computer code.

Learning both music and computer science from an early age positioned Vinay perfectly for music technology. "I went to music school, and the other musicians needed someone to bring their technical ideas to light," he said.

Vinay then submitted a research paper to the 2016 Web Audio Conference, hosted at Georgia Tech. "I met Jason Freeman, Gil Weinberg, and Alexander Lerch, and I was immediately drawn to the program."

"It's the perfect marriage of the music and technology I wanted. And I liked the city."

Vinay's primary goal has always been to build a better synthesizer of sounds. "But the numbers our algorithms produce don't necessarily align to human perception," he said. "That disconnect is where it's interesting."

"If we want our machines to behave more human, they need to hear and produce sound in a way humans find interesting and not annoying."

Music technology allows musicians to explore music through a vast network of technical fields, according to Vinay. "In this program, we have cognitive psychology, digital signal processing, programming, machine learning, musicology, biofeedback, and there's a lot of science that goes into all these things," he said.

"There's always an intersection between music and something in science you've never thought of."