Alexander Lerch is an Associate Professor at the School of Music, Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his "Diplom-Ingenieur'' (EE) and his PhD (Audio Communications) from Technical University Berlin. Lerch joined Georgia Tech in 2013 and teaches classes on music signal processing, computational music analysis, audio technology, and audio software engineering. Before he joined Georgia Tech, Lerch was Head of Research at his company zplane.development, an industry leader in music technology licensing. zplane technology includes algorithms such as time-stretching and automatic key detection and is used by millions of musicians and producers world-wide.       

Lerch's research focuses on teaching computers to listen to and comprehend music. His research field, Music Information Retrieval (MIR), positions him at the intersection of signal processing, machine learning, music psychology, and systematic musicology. His Music Informatics Group (http://www.musicinformatics.gatech.edu) creates artificially intelligent software for music generation, production, and consumption and generates new insights into music and its performance.

Lerch authored more than 40 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers. His text book "An Introduction to Audio Content Analysis" (IEEE/Wiley 2012) and the accompanying online materials at www.AudioContentAnalysis.org helped define educational practice in the field.