Our Crowdfunding Groups
We are Team MUSIC, an interdisciplinary research team of seven undergraduates from the Gemstone Program in University of Maryland’s Honors College. In Gemstone, students form teams in freshman year based on their interest in student-proposed projects, and then collaborate on a team research project that results in a senior thesis.
With the growing availability of music on the Internet, people are turning to music recommendation services to discover new music. While there are popular services that can provide users with adequate recommendations, these programs often fail to consider the following:
How do people perceive music?
This is the drawback of current systems – they don’t bridge the gap between automation and cognition. This is the same gap that we aim to fill with our research. We are developing a novel music recommendation method that intends to integrate aspects of human perception of music into an automated song recommendation system. We hypothesize that by incorporating a model for human perception of music into a song recommendation system, we will be able to more accurately represent a user’s musical tastes.
One of our goals is to present our research findings at a conference. We can only achieve this through your support! You can help sponsor our trip to the 2015 Society for Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC) Conference in Nashville, Tennessee (hosted by Vanderbilt University). The SMPC is one of the leading organizations for the field of music perception. With your donation, you can provide Team MUSIC with a unique academic experience that not many undergraduates have the opportunity to encounter.
We have estimated that it will cost $4,000 for us to send four team members to attend and present at the SMPC conference, and a minimum of $750 per person for each additional team member that we send. A significant portion of the budget will be allocated toward hotel fees ($50 per person per night) and living expenditures ($25 per person per day). Conference registration is also fairly costly, weighing in at over $100 per person. As you can see, these costs can add up pretty quickly. We really need your support. Any supplemental funding that we receive will go toward our research survey costs to contribute to the development of our music recommendation system. Thank you!
You can check out our websites here!
Website: http://gemstoneteammusic.webflow.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gemsteammusic
Twitter: https://twitter.com/gemsteammusic
Email: music.gemstone@gmail.com
Gifts in support of the University of Maryland are accepted and managed by the University of Maryland College Park Foundation, Inc., an affiliated 501(c)(3) organization authorized by the Board of Regents. Contributions to the University of Maryland are tax deductible as allowed by law. Please see your tax advisor for details.
This amount will help pay for the team's presentation supplies for the conference.
This amount will cover a team member's living expenses for one day in Nashville.
A donation at this level will fund one team member's stay in a hotel room for one night.
This will help fund the cost of one team member's conference registration fee.
A donation at the Multi-Platinum level will cover the cost of gas money and a car rental.
A donation at the diamond level will cover the majority of the cost for an additional team member to attend and present at the conference.