Curriculum Vitae
Prof. Dr. Meinard Müller
International Audio Laboratories Erlangen
Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
Lehrstuhl für Semantische Audiosignalverarbeitung
Am Wolfsmantel 33
91058 Erlangen
Email: meinard.mueller@audiolabs-erlangen.de
Office: Room 3R4.03
Phone: +49 9131 85 20504
Fax: +49 9131 85 20524
Recent Positions
| 09/2012 - present | Professor, Semantic Audio Processing, International Audio Laboratories Erlangen, University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany |
| 03/2012 - 08/2012 | Professor, Praktische Informatik/Audiosignalverarbeitung, Universität Bonn, Germany |
| 12/2007 - 02/2012 | Senior Researcher, Cluster of Excellence, Multimodal Computing and Interaction (MMCI), MPI Informatik and Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany |
| 09/2007 - 11/2007 | Senior Researcher, Max Planck Center for Visual Computing and Communication, MPI Informatik, Saarbrücken, Germany |
| 04/2003 - 08/2007 | Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter, Universität Bonn, Germany |
| 04/2002 - 03/2003 | Postdoctoral Research, Mathematical Department, Keio University, Japan |
Education
| 2007 | Habilitation, Computer Science, University of Bonn |
| 2001 | Ph.D., Computer Science, University of Bonn |
| 1997 | Diplom, Mathematics, University of Bonn |
| 1988 | Abitur, Otto-Hahn-Gymnasium Böblingen |
Research Stays / Study
| 02/2006 - 03/2006 | Postdoctoral research stay, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan, (JSPS Post-doctoral Fellowship for Foreign Researchers) |
| 04/2002 - 03/2003 | Postdoctoral research stay, Mathematical Department, Keio University, Japan (Monbukagakusho scholarship program) |
| 09/2001 - 03/2002 | Japanese Language Program, Keio University, Japan (DAAD scholarship Stipendium zum Studium ostasiatischer Sprachen) |
| 07/2000 - 09/2000 | Research stay, Hitachi Central Research Laboratory, Japan (JISTEC-REES Program) |
| 02/2000 - 03/2000 | Research stay, Mathematical Department, University of California at Berkeley |
| 08/1999 - 06/2001 | Ph.D. Scholarship, German National Merit Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes) |
| 09/1997 - 08/1998 | Japanese Language Program, Keio University, Japan (East-Asia-Scholarship, Daimler-Benz AG and Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes) |
| 07/1997 - 08/1997 | Study visit (Japanese), Lewis & Clark College, Portland, USA, (Waseda/Oregon Summer Program) |
| 08/1993 - 06/1994 | Study visit (mathematics, music), Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, USA (Exchange program Akademisches Auslandsamt Bonn) |
Hobbies
- Piano
- Running
Short Bio
Meinard Müller received the Diploma degree (1997) in mathematics and the Ph.D. degree (2001) in computer science from the University of Bonn, Germany. After his postdoctoral studies (2001-2003) in Japan and his habilitation (2003-2007) in multimedia retrieval in Bonn, he worked as a senior researcher at Saarland University and the Max-Planck Institut für Informatik (2007-2012). Since 2012, he has held a professorship for Semantic Audio Signal Processing at the International Audio Laboratories Erlangen, a joint institute of the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) and the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS. His recent research interests include music processing, music information retrieval, audio signal processing, and motion processing. He was a member of the IEEE Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing Technical Committee (2010 to 2015), a member of the Senior Editorial Board of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (2018 to 2022), and a member of the Board of Directors of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (2009 to 2021, being its president in 2020/2021). Since 2017, he has been a member of the Editorial Board of the Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval, serving as editor-in-chief since 2024. In 2020, he was elevated to ACM Senior Member and to IEEE Fellow for contributions to music signal processing.
Teaching and Education
Besides his scientific research, Meinard Müller has been very active in teaching music and audio processing. He wrote a monograph titled Information Retrieval for Music and Motion (Springer 2007) as well as a textbook titled Fundamentals of Music Processing (Springer 2015), covering essential techniques and algorithms applicable to a wide range of music and audio analysis, classification, and retrieval problems. The book is now widely used as a standard textbook in academic music signal processing curricula worldwide, including leading universities such as MIT (US), NYU (US), KAIST (Korea), and QMU (UK).
In 2021, Meinard Müller massively extended and complemented the textbook by developing a comprehensive open-source multimedia package he refers to as the FMP Notebooks. These notebooks, organized alongside the textbook's second edition (Springer 2021), provide additional audio-visual material and Python code examples that implement all computational approaches step by step. Using Jupyter notebooks, web applications, and an extensive software library hosted on GitHub, the FMP notebooks offer an interactive framework that allows students to experiment with their music examples, explore the effect of parameter settings, and understand the computed results through suitable visualizations and sonifications.
Meinard Müller's commitment to signal processing education is reflected in the numerous tutorials and courses he has given at major conferences, including ICASSP (2009, 2011, 2019), ISMIR (2007, 2010, 2011, 2014, 2017, 2019, 2023), DAFx (2014), and Eurographics (2009, 2023). Furthermore, he has regularly conducted courses for girls' days (addressing school children) and participated in educational workshops for high school teachers. Throughout his career, he has contributed open-access educational software packages, including specialized toolboxes for topics such as beat tracking, harmonic analysis, time-scale modification, nonnegative matrix factorization, music synchronization, F0 estimation, and sonification. Similarly, he has provided numerous open-domain and carefully curated music audio datasets with coherent and high-quality annotations, which are valuable for both research and educational purposes.
For a systematic overview and links to Meinard Müller's educational materials, please refer to the website.
Projects and Supervision
While Meinard Müller's scientific background lies in computer science, mathematics, and engineering, he has extensive experience conducting interdisciplinary research in collaboration with historical musicologists (e.g., within the projects "Computer-Assisted Analysis of Harmonic Structures for Wagner's Ring" and "Freischütz Digital – Paradigmatic Implementation of an Authentic Digital Edition Concept") and ethnomusicologists (e.g., within the project "Computational Analysis of Traditional Georgian Vocal Music"). Over the last ten years, Meinard Müller has been the principal investigator of more than ten MIR-related research projects funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Besides managing these projects, Meinard Müller focuses on supporting and training young scientists, ensuring that all project members can earn their Ph.D. degrees within a four-year doctoral period, parallel to the project work. In this way, Meinard Müller has successfully led 15 students to a Ph.D. degree within a doctoral period of four years (parallel to the project work).
A special distinction from the DFG was awarded to Meinard Müller in 2023, providing funding for his LEARN project in the highly competitive Reinhart Koselleck Programme, which enables outstanding researchers with a proven scientific track record to pursue exceptionally innovative, higher-risk projects.
For more details, we refer to Meinard Müller's project overview website.