Rhythm Jain, who is a musician and a scientist, comes from a musical family that gave her the perfect name for the work she is doing now, which is all about music.

As the child of a military man, Jain moved around a lot in her native India, experiencing different regions, languages, cultures, and especially music. 

“When my brother wanted to watch the 2011 Cricket World Cup, I didn’t care about the matches, but I asked him to call me whenever the national anthem of each country was being played,” said Jain, who helped lead Women in Music Tech at Georgia Tech when she was a student. “I was fascinated by this notion that each country expressed its patriotism in different ways melodically, and how the people from different countries perceived the music differently.”

Her interest in perception and cognition of music brought her to Georgia Tech, where some of her research while pursuing a Master of Music Technology was focused on studying ragas, the melodic framework in Hindustani classical music. Through her cross-cultural research on listener’s perception of various Hindustani ragas, Jain explored the link between time-of-day and enculturation.  

Then she shifted gears to music transcription, developing algorithms to transcribe and translate the music of oral traditions. Now Jain, who has taught herself the guitar and is dabbling with electronic music and synthesizers and she is using the knowledge and skills she developed at the Georgia Tech School of Music to build music recommendation algorithms for Sirius XM/Pandora.