Chris Donahue Assistant Professor Website Google Scholars Link 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 CSD Courses Taught 15322 - Spring, 2025 15622 - Spring, 2025 15622 - Spring, 2024 15322 - Spring, 2024 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.
