Cameron Summers

Jazz trumpeter who works in machine learning and data science. I spent nearly a decade playing professionally in New York and Los Angeles, including Broadway national tours and Elevation, a double Grammy-nominated album by Patrick Williams, and today I perform with my own groups and with other bands around Northwest Arkansas, most recently as a guest artist at Polyball, ETH Zurich's annual ball in Zurich, Switzerland. Chosen from open video submissions in the Recording Academy's My Grammy Moment, I performed with Foo Fighters at the Grammy Awards, with John Paul Jones conducting.

Alongside music, I work in machine learning. It began with machine listening research at Gracenote, on technology used for music discovery by Apple, Spotify, Google, and Amazon, and I'm a named inventor on 33 granted U.S. patents. Today I do data science consulting for Tidepool, where I designed the insulin and carbohydrate metabolism simulator it uses and the sensor-noise safety analysis for the FDA clearance of Tidepool Loop, an automated insulin dosing app. Other projects include bird detection for the National Park Service in Alaska and composition algorithms for TYGER, a gaming music service.

Organum Engine is where the two meet: a machine learning system I built that listens to my trumpet and adds harmony in real time. I lead a trio and a quintet, including Hymnus, a 45-minute work for jazz quintet commissioned by the University of Arkansas Honors College. I also give solo lecture-demos: a 60–90 minute talk on the musical and technical ideas, plus a live set.