Christos Plachouras



background

Education

Queen Mary University of London, Center for Digital Music (C4DM) - PhD in Artificial Intelligence and Music
Thesis: Multimodal audio language models, Advisors: Emmanouil Benetos, Johan Pauwels
Sep 2023 - Present

Universitat Pompeu Fara, Music Technology Group (MTG) - MSc in Sound and Music Computing
Thesis: Evaluation framework for music representation learning, Advisors: Dmitry Bogdanov, Pablo Alonso
Sep 2021 - Aug 2023

New York University - BSc in Computer Science, Major in Music, Minor in Sound and Music Computing
Thesis: Hierarchical music structure analysis and similarity, Advisor: Carlos Guedes
Sep 2017 - May 2021

Experience (selected)

Utopia Music - Data Scientist (R&D)
Audio fingerprinting deep learning models for massive-scale broadcast monitoring
Oct 2022 - Jul 2023

Audiostack - R&D Engineer
Programmatic sound design, rearrangement, and mixing
Jan 2022 - Jul 2022

Music and Sound Cultures Research Lab - Research Assistant
Music similarity, mode recognition, and visualization for large, non-eurogenic music collections
May 2018 - Jun 2021

NYU Steinhardt - Research Student
Hierarchical music structure analysis and structure similarity
Sep 2019 - May 2019


research


My research is focused on making machines able to understand audio and music. Within that scope, I investigate:
  1. how to develop better audio representations
  2. how to make better multimodal LLMs, and
  3. how to best evaluate multimodal models and ensure their usefulness in real-world applications.

Publications and presentations

(alternatively, see google scholar)

Towards a Unified Representation Evaluation Framework Beyond Downstream Tasks |
C. Plachouras, J. Guinot, G. Fazekas, E. Quinton, E. Benetos, J. Pauwels
International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), 2025

Learning Music Audio Representations with Limited Data |
C. Plachouras, E. Benetos, J. Pauwels
IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2025

Foundation Models for Music: A Survey |
Ma, Y. et al
arXiv, [Under review], 2024

mir_ref: A Representation Evaluation Framework for Music Information Retrieval Tasks |
C. Plachouras., P. Alonso-Jiménez, D. Bogdanov
Machine Learning for Audio Workshop, Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023

Music rearrangement using hierarchical segmentation |
C. Plachouras, M. Miron
IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2023

Utilizing Hierarchical Structure for Audio-Based Music Similarity |
C. Plachouras
Late-Breaking Demo, International Society of Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) Conference, 2021

Mapping Timbre Space in Regional Music Collections using HPSS Decomposition |
K.K. Ganguli, C. Plachouras, S. Sentürk, A. Eisenberg, & C. Guedes
International Conference on Timbre, 2020

Mapping the Sounds of the Swahili coast and the Arab Mashriq |

K. Trochidis, B. Russell, A. J. Eisenberg, K. Ganguli, O. Gonez, C. Plachouras, C. Guedes, & V. Danielson
TROMPA presentation, Digital Libraries for Musicology (ISMIR 2019), 2019

music

Compositions (selected)

MUFFLED (album) |
Christos Plachouras, October 2021

You Drive Me Crazy |
Christos Plachouras, September 2021

New Time |
Christos Plachouras, August 2020

12 Preludes of Tonal Resolution for Piano (album) |
Christos Plachouras, August 2019

Ascending |
NYU Bleep Bloop, September 2019

Piece for String Quartet |
Omer Quartet, Live at NYUAD Blue Hall, March 2019

Performances (selected)

Rachmaninoff - Piano Concerto No. 2, I. Moderato |
Christos Plachouras, Ioannis Potamousis, Live at NYUAD Blue Hall, December 2018

Bach - Partita No. 2 in C minor, I. Simfonia |
Christos Plachouras, Live at NYUAD Blue Hall, May 2018

Messiaen - Vingt Regards - II. Regard de l'étoile |
Christos Plachouras, Studio Odeon, Athens, October 2016

Making music online |
Making music online in real time with musicians across the world, 2020


writing

Perspectives on Music Performance Anxiety |
Why your stage fright uncovers deeper issues in music education and culture

Reflections |
A collection of weekly reflections on topics such as wellbeing, happiness, and meditation.