Chris Donahue is an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon and part-time research scientist at Google Magenta with 13 years of experience at the intersection of machine learning, music, and creative interaction. He builds and evaluates generative audio models—contributing to notable projects like WaveGAN and Magenta.js where he implemented Piano Genie enhancements and audio evaluation metrics such as inception scores. His background spans academic research (PhD in Music, postdoc at Stanford) and industry research roles at Google DeepMind, giving him a rare blend of musical expertise and ML rigor. Chris is especially skilled at making ML models more usable for creative practitioners, from browser-based music generation to raw audio synthesis.
13 years of coding experience
1 year of employment as a software developer
University of California, San Diego
Bachelor of Science - BS Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin
Postdoctoral Scholar Computer Science, Postdoctoral Scholar Computer Science at Stanford University
WaveGAN: Learn to synthesize raw audio with generative adversarial networks
Role in this project:
ML Engineer
Contributions:101 commits, 6 PRs, 27 pushes in 4 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Chris's contributions focused on adding and implementing evaluation metrics for a WaveGAN model, a generative adversarial network for audio synthesis. This included incorporating the inception score to assess the quality of generated audio samples. The user worked with TensorFlow and potentially related libraries like librosa, demonstrating expertise in machine learning model evaluation and audio processing.
Magenta.js: Music and Art Generation with Machine Learning in the browser
Role in this project:
ML Engineer
Contributions:5 commits, 7 PRs, 23 comments in 8 months
Contributions summary:Chris's contributions primarily revolve around enhancing the Piano Genie model within the magenta-js repository. They implemented the Piano Genie model, refactored the API for improved clarity, and extended its functionality with new features like conditioning on key signatures and chord families. Further improvements included adding a model warmup during initialization. The user appears to be a core contributor to this specific ML-driven project.
artbrowsermagenta-jsjavascriptmagenta
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Chris Donahue - Assistant Professor at Google DeepMind