Prague Music Computing Group

We are a new research group that, as the name suggests, works on the computational processing and modeling of music in its various forms. Our strongest topics are Optical Music Recognition (OMR), and digital Gregorian chant scholarship. We are a part of the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics (UFAL).

The People

MgA. Jan Hajič jr., Ph.D. -- group lead and harpsichordist

Assoc. Prof. Pavel Pecina, Ph.D. -- in his capacity as PhD student supervisor

Mgr. Jiří Mayer -- Ph.D. student, Optical Music Recognition

Mgr. Adam Štefunko -- Ph.D. student, Computational models of basso continuo

Mgr. Vojtěch Lanz -- Ph.D. student, non-musical thesis but involved in chant scholarship as DACT project member -- melody segmentation with unsupervised Bayesian methods.

Bc. Anna Dvořáková -- Mgr. student, DACT project member. Bc. thesis on Analysing Gregorian chant repertoire traditions with clustering, community detection, and topic models (defended Sep. 2024).

Bc. Jan Borecký -- Mgr. student, music as navigational tool in open-world games for the visually impaired (defended June 2025).

Bc. Filip Ruta -- Mgr. student, music notation learning game with a MIDI keyboard and generated content (defended June 2025).

Vojtěch Dvořák -- Bc. student, image segmentation fast sheet music layout analysis. Also working on the OmniOMR project.

Šimon Libřický -- Bc. student, computational model of difficulty for the saxophone. Previously: component for automatically incorporating arbitrary symbolic music processing tools into MuseScore 3.6 (NPRG045)

Reut Tal -- Bc. student, a game for collecting music emotion judgments in an immersive environment (defended Feb 2025)

Bc. Kristýna Harvanová -- Mgr. student, Bc. thesis on synthesizing realistic images for Optical Music Recognition (defended Sep. 2024).

Bc. Patrik Backo -- Mgr. student, Bc. thesis on generating drum kit sounds for electronic music (defended Sep. 2024).

Emre Rasimgil -- Bc. student, generating background music cheaply (defended Sep. 2024)

The Projects

OmniOMR (2023-2027): a project of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic for developing an Optical Music Recognition system and deploying it at scale in the Moravian Library. PI: Jan Hajič.

DACT (2023-2030), Chant Analytics. Jan Hajič is a co-investigator of this 7-year Partnership Grant of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (grant no. 895-2023-1002), leading the Chant Analytics team.

MASHCIMA (2023-2025): a project of the Grant Agency of the Charles University (GAUK) focusing on generating synthetic data for Optical Music Recognition. PI: Jiří Mayer.

Teaching

In the winter semester, we teach the Computational Music Processing course (NPFL144).

In the summer semester, we teach the Practicum in Computational Music Processing course (NPFL145).

If you are interested in a music-oriented thesis or individual software project, contact: hajicj@ufal.mff.cuni.cz

Note: We're looking for students for the international SCORIA student project with the Institute of Computational Perception in Linz.

The News

(Future)

November 17th, 2025: PMCG will organize the 8th WoRMS -- International Workshop on Reading Music Systems, the central venue for Optical Music Researchers to talk about their most cutting-edge work in progress.

(Past)

June 10th, 2025: Filip Ruta and Jan Borecký defend their Masters theses, both with an excellent result. Congratulations!

June 7th, 2025: Huge congratulations to Vojtěch Lanz and Šimon Libřický, whose work was accepted to the ISMIR 2025 conference in South Korea! Vojtěch worked on memory-optimal segmentation of Gregorian chant melodies with unsupervised Bayesian models (Hierarchical Pitman-Yor processes). Šimon created a method for estimating the difficulty of saxophone compositions, recorded a dataset of saxophone trills, and made this available as a MuseScore plugin that highlights the hard parts. We are very much looking forward to the feedback our work will receive in South Korea.

June 3rd-6th, 2025: Anna Dvořáková and Jan Hajič jr. go to MEC in London to present the ChantMapper and ChantLab software! For Anna, this is the first time presenting at a conference. (Vojtěch Lanz is on an industry internship, so he could not come.) On the way, we were also able to visit prof. Emma Hornby in Bristol, to find out more about how they work with a specific pre-staff notation: Old Hispanic neumes, using their CEAP software. Both the visit and the conference provided a lot of insight into what directions to take with the Chant Analytics group.

May 22nd, 2025: Adam Štefunko got his first paper accepted: a dataset of live basso continuo realisations, recorded with harpsichordists (more than 60,000 notes!), and using state-of-the-art score-to-performance alignment methods to link them to the written figured bass lines. This is an ongoing collaboration with Suhit Chiruthapudi and Carlos Cancino-Chacon from CP JKU in Linz.

May 6th-7th, 2025: Jan Hajič jr. was invited to Riga to teach a course on Digital Musicology at the Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music, supported by the DH Latvia project. It was a great pleasure to meet like-minded colleagues from the Baltics, both from musicology, computer science, and the early music performance community. Many thanks to Ieva Vīvere and Laura Švītiņa for organising this!

March 14th, 2025: Anna Dvořáková and Vojtěch Lanz presented their MEC papers (ChantMapper and ChantLab web apps for Gregorian chant analysis) for the broader chant scholarship community at the 17th DACT workshop (remote).

February 14th, 2025: PMCG students Anna Dvořáková and Vojtěch Lanz, who work for the DACT Chant Analytics team, got their papers accepted to the Music Encoding Conference 2025 in London! Congratulations!

February 13th-14th, 2025: Hackathon on Romani Chords and digital tools for recording performance: accordions, guitars, ... Organized by Petr Nuska at the Ethnological Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences.

February 10th, 2025: Reut Tal has defended her bachelor thesis (A game interface for annotating emotion in music) with the highest mark, and was selected as one of the excellent theses for an interview! The first international student at Matfyz to be selected for this.

January 28th, 2025: Jan Hajič jr. talked about his research into phylogenetics of Gregorian Chant at the "One Stream with Computer Science" event for high school students (recording available in Czech)

November 28th, 2024: Jan Hajič jr. will represent PMCG at the Open Doors Day of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics.

September 5th, 2024: Three of our students defend their Bc. theses: Anna Dvořáková (mapping the repertoire of Gregorian Chant), Patrik Backo (Neural drum one-shot synthesis) and Emre Rasimgil (generating low-cost elevator music).

September 19th, 2024: We go to Vienna! Jan Hajič and Adam Štefunko are presenting PMCG work for the

June 6th, 2024: DACT Chant Analytics Workshop

April 19th, 2024: 1st PMCG Workshop