Danny Diamond

Ph.D. student

Danny Diamond is a PhD student at the Insight Centre for Data Analytics (Data Science Institute), University of Galway, Ireland. His work is based in the fields of MIR (music information retrieval) and computational musicology and is funded under the EU H2020 Polifonia project. Supervision is by Dr James McDermott (University of Galway) and adjunct supervisor Prof. Mathieu d’Aquin (Université de Lorraine). Danny’s research is focussed on detection of similar melodies and ‘tune families’ within and between large corpora of Irish and European folk music.

Danny has a background in the digital humanities, having worked for a decade with the Irish Traditional Music Archive, cataloguing, managing and curating their digital audio holdings.

He also has worked freelance for many years as a musician, composer and recording engineer. Notable projects include: Musical Director/performer/composer on Teaċ Daṁsa’s Swan Lake / Loch na hEala (Best Production, Irish Times Theatre Awards 2017); co-founder of the bands Slow Moving Clouds and Mórga.

Research Interests

— Music information retrieval & computational musicology: melodic similarity; music structure segmentation; cover song detection

— Algorithmic composition.

— Irish traditional music: practice, composition, performance, history, social context and musicology.

— Digital humanities: ontologies; data management; digital archiving.

— Information retrieval and NLP

Selected awards and residencies

— Musician in Residence @ Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, 2019

— Arts Council Traditional Arts Bursary Award, 2018

— (nomination) The Irish Times Traditional Album of the Year 2016 (Performer & recording engineer for NORTH)

— Arts Council Deis Recording Awards: 2013; 2014; 2015; 2017

— Music Network / Arts Council Music Capital Award 2013