Chris Donahue
Office 7127 Gates and Hillman Centers
Email chrisdonahue@cmu.edu
Phone (412) 268-1969
Department
Computer Science Department
Administrative Support Person
Christina Contreras
Research Interests
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Advisees
Irmak Bukey
Wayne Chi
Biography
Before CMU, Chris was a postdoctoral scholar in the CS department at Stanford advised by Percy Liang. Chris holds a PhD from UC San Diego where he was jointly advised by Miller Puckette (music) and Julian McAuley (CS).
Chris’s research has been featured in live performances by professional musicians like The Flaming Lips, and also empowers hundreds of daily users to convert their favorite music into interactive content through his website Beat Sage. His work has also received coverage from MIT Tech Review, The Verge, Business Insider, and Pitchfork.
Research Statement
Chris's research goal is to develop and responsibly deploy generative AI for music and creativity, thereby unlocking and augmenting human creative potential. In practice, this involves improving machine learning methods for controllable generative modeling of music and audio, and deploying real-world interactive systems that allow anyone to harness generative music AI to accomplish their creative goals through intuitive forms of control. Methodologically, Chris's work centers on extending language model methods to improve controllability and address domain-specific challenges found in audio and music, such as modeling long contexts or generating in real-time with minimal delay.