Web Developer Back-end Engineer for Music Related Citizen Science Infrastructure

Are you looking for a challenging job in a dynamic interdisciplinary team? The Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) is looking for an enthusiastic and experienced back-end engineer, contributing to the development of a flexible and sustainable infrastructure for MUSic-related Citizen Science Listening Experiments (MUSCLE). The project is funded by a PDI-SSH grant awarded to the Music Cognition Group  (MCG), part of the research unit Language & Music Cognition (LMC), at the ILLC.

The Institute for Logic, Language and Computation  (ILLC) is one of the six Research Schools within the Amsterdam Institute for Humanities Research  (AIHR), and a renowned research institute at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), in which researchers from the Faculty of Humanities and the Faculty of Science collaborate. The ILLC offers a friendly international research environment with world-class faculty in all of its areas of specialization, including music cognition and computational musicology. We are based in the beautiful city of Amsterdam, renowned for its historic system of canals, its laid-back cosmopolitan atmosphere, and its excellent connections to the rest of Europe and the world.

What are you going to do?

Data science has had an enormous impact on music research in the last few years, with several international labs basing their scientific insights on large amounts of empirical data. MCG has contributed to this research by showing that engaging games can serve as a powerful method to attract hundreds of thousands reliable participant responses.

However, in addition to the technical demands of game-like large-scale listening experiments, both music and citizen science require infrastructural support that is currently not addressed by the existing digital infrastructures. Hence, the current project aims to develop a flexible and sustainable infrastructure for citizen science listening experiments, for domains that have special needs with regard to high-quality, platform-independent audio presentation, processing and timing of responses (e.g., music information retrieval, music cognition, computational musicology, phonetics and speech research).

The back-end engineer will –together with a team consisting of, among others, a gamification expert, a front-end and an exchange engineer– be responsible for the design and implementation of the MUSCLE infrastructure.

Your tasks and responsibilities:

• develop the code-base of the MUSCLE infrastructure, based on the existing Django infrastructure of the Amsterdam Music Lab (AML);
• design and implement a battery of audio playback options, timing support, and gamification options;
• be responsible for integrating and maintaining the MUSCLE infrastructure;
• ensure that the application components are re-usable and suitable for future online experiments;
• ensure the code base can be verified, tested, extended and deployed easily by different parties;
• support UvA researchers in using the MUSCLE infrastructure for their own experiments.