I am Ábel, a computer science graduate from RWTH Aachen University.
My academic interests include AI for music generation, natural language processing, and computational neuroscience.
Beyond my studies, I am passionate about playing the piano and enjoy transcribing recordings from my favorite musicians,
Brad Mehldau and Chick Corea.
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Research and Projects
🎹 Real-time Human-AI Improvisation over Jazz Standards
Fall 2025
I am currently pursuing my master’s thesis at the Chair for Artificial Intelligence Methodology at RWTH Aachen, exploring real-time human-AI musical interaction on a "Yamaha Disklavier" MIDI keyboard. The goal is to fine-tune a chord accompaniment agent with reinforcement learning to generate musically sensible chords in response to a melody played by a human performer. The system aims to enable engaging jam sessions over jazz standards by reharmonizing the performer’s melody and offering multiple harmonic alternatives through an interactive user interface.
🎹 Generating Piano Music with Transformers: A Comparative Study of Scale, Data and Metrics
Summer 2025
As part of a university lab project, I worked on generating MIDI piano performances with Transformers. We systematically compared different datasets, model architectures, model sizes, and training strategies to evaluate their impact on generative quality. To support model development and evaluation, we examined a range of quantitative metrics and analyzed how well they correlate with human judgment collected through listening studies. Our best-performing model, a 950M-parameter transformer trained on 80K MIDI files from diverse genres, produces outputs that are often rated as human-composed in a Turing-style listening survey.
VR Game for Learning Git
Summer 2025
I co-developed a 3D VR game in Unity to teach git in an interactive, hands-on environment. Branches are represented as color-coded shelves, and files as items that can be put on the shelves (e.g., cubes for .py, books for .docx), allowing students to visualize and experiment with core git commands like add, commit, merge, and push. The user can trigger git commands from a UI panel with the VR controller and observe the effect in the immersive environment. The game provides a risk-free space to build mental models, reinforce correct workflows, and reduce fear of mistakes, preparing learners for real-world git projects.
Mamba State-space Model
Summer 2024
Over the past summer at my home university, I participated in a research seminar at the Machine Learning and Reasoning chair involving Mamba, a recent state-space model. The experience sparked my interest in continuing to explore state-space models on music data. Since Mamba-variants can process extremely long sequences more efficiently than Transformers, it can be interesting to see how they handle long temporal dependencies in music data.
Bachelor's Thesis at Institute for Computational and Systems Neuroscience
October 2022 – May 2023
The goal for this project was to optimize the hyper-parameters of a spiking neural network model with Optuna. The work involved parallel computation on the JURECA cluster and experimentation with sampling algorithms (TPE, random).
🚙 Lab Course at Cyber-Physical Mobility Lab
October 2021 – February 2022
My group implemented trajectory planning and collision avoidance for model vehicles in C++. The workflow was organized in team of six with Scrum and Git.
🎵 Computer-generated Music
Summer 2020
During my bachelor's degree at RWTH Aachen University, I did a seminar on computer-generated music, where I covered recent neural-network-based approaches like Google Magenta or the Bachbot, also discussing the LZ compression algorithm within the OpenMusic software.
Work Experience
Tutor at Research Group for Programming Languages and Verification
October 2021 – March 2022, October 2022 – March 2023
I tutored students in Software Development (Java), Functional Programming (Haskell), Logic Programming (Prolog) and software verification, conducted weekly classes and assessed coding assignments.
Internship at BWI GmbH
March 2020
I was introduced to current JIRA projects and gained an overview of project management and project organization in Scrum.
Education
RWTH Aachen University
MSc Computer Science
October 2023 – Present
KAIST
MSc Computer Science Exchange
September 2024 – December 2024
Received DUO-Korea Scholarship
RWTH Aachen University
BSc Computer Science
October 2019 – June 2023
Goethe Gymnasium Bad Ems
A levels (Abitur)
Majors: English, Mathematics, Physics
DPG Abitur Prize in Physics
Programming Stack
Main Languages
Python, Java
Project Experience in
Bash, C, C++, C#, SQL
Frameworks
PyTorch, Librosa, NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, Seaborn
Tools & Systems
Linux, Git, Slurm, Jupyter, Unity
Performances
During my exchange semester at KAIST, I joined “창작동화” Jazz Band as a keyboardist. We performed at multiple campus events and had a featured performance at a jazz bar in Seoul. Here are a couple of recordings:
Cafe Dream performance
I played “Beautiful Love”.
KAIST winter performance
I played “Spain”, “How Deep Is the Ocean?”, and “September”. I also edited and color-graded the video.
Interests
Jazz piano, classical piano, transcribing music, K-pop, video editing, psychology, football, table tennis, tennis, running
Check out my friends
Meet my mentor Carrie Yuan.