Rate My Professor Carlos Guedes

Carlos Guedes is Professor of Music in the Division of Arts and Humanities at New York University Abu Dhabi, where he also holds an affiliated position as Associate Professor in Computer Engineering. He earned a BM from the Polytechnic of Porto, School of Music and Performing Arts, followed by an MA and PhD from New York University. Guedes maintains a diverse career encompassing composition, sound design, performance, education, and research. As a composer, he has garnered over 80 international premieres featured in renowned venues such as Expo 2020, Ars Electronica, ICMC, Shanghai eArts, The Kitchen, Beijing Modern Music Festival, and Casa da Música. His eclectic oeuvre integrates influences ranging from industrial and carnatic music to western classical traditions and trans-cultural improvisation, leveraging computational technologies to broaden musical expression. Notable recent works include the choreomusical piece Jinn premiered at NYU Abu Dhabi in 2016 and Time Poetries, a series for Drumming GP exploring temporal illusions, for which he serves as composer-in-residence in 2022.

Guedes founded the Music and Sound Cultures (MaSC) research group at NYU Abu Dhabi, pioneering hybrid methodologies that fuse computational analysis with humanistic inquiry into music from the Gulf region, East Africa, and South India. The group advances funded initiatives developing VR environments, games, and digital repositories to foster interaction and preservation of regional musical heritage, including projects on Shihuh traditions and Swahili aesthetics. He previously headed NYU Abu Dhabi's Music Program from 2013 to 2016, overseeing curriculum development, reaccreditation, facilities expansion, and partnerships with NYU Shanghai and NYU Steinhardt's Music Technology program. His scholarly contributions feature prominently in music information retrieval and computational music, with highly cited works such as Optical music recognition: state-of-the-art and open issues (2012), Staff detection with stable paths (2009), and Modeling Carnatic Rhythm Generation: A Data-Driven approach based on Rhythmic Analysis (2018, SMC Best Paper Award). Guedes has secured major funding, including a 2019 NYUAD Research Enhancement Fund grant of $249,634 for cross-cultural rhythm studies and a 2021 Sheikh Saud bin Saqr Al Qasimi Foundation faculty grant of 35,000 AED for documenting Shihuh musical practices. He is additionally Affiliated Associate Professor of Music in Music Technology at NYU Steinhardt.