29 May 2025, 12PM, Strand Campus, King’s College London: DongMin will give a talk on Music computing on traditional Korean sources as part of the DDH Lunchtime Seminar series.

Title: Revitalizing Musical Heritage: Optical Recognition and AI-Based Generation of Korean Jeongganbo Music

Abstract: This seminar presents groundbreaking research on the preservation and revitalization of Korean traditional music through computational methods. The first paper introduces a novel optical music recognition (OMR) system for Jeongganbo, a 15th-century Korean notation system capable of jointly expressing pitch and duration. This system achieves recognition rates close to 90% on real-world scores, establishing the first comprehensive dataset and neural-based transcription framework for this cultural heritage. Building on this foundation, the second paper demonstrates how transformer-based models can revive and arrange ancient melodies for modern performance. By developing specialized encoding schemes that respect the positional nature of Jeongganbo notation, these models successfully transformed 15th-century court music pieces (Chihwapyeong and Chwipunghyeong) into arrangements for a six-instrument ensemble that were performed by the National Gugak Center’s Court Music Orchestra. Together, these works represent significant advances in computational ethnomusicology, offering new approaches to cultural preservation while expanding the horizons of music information retrieval for non-Western traditions.

DongMin ’s talk is an in-person event. The event will take place in room S3.41 at the Strand building (Strand Campus, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS) between 12:00pm – 13:00pm on Thursday, 29 May 2025.