Alexander Lerch is Associate Dean for Research and Creative Practice and Professor at the College of Design, Georgia Institute of Technology.

Lerch's research on machine understanding of audio and music positions him at the intersection of signal processing, machine learning, and music. He aims at creating artificially intelligent software for music generation, production, and consumption.

Lerch studied Electrical Engineering at the Berlin Institute of Technology and Tonmeister (music production) at the University of Arts, Berlin; he received his PhD (Audio Communications) from the Berlin Institute of Technology in the year 2008. He co-founded the company zplane.development, an industry leader providing advanced music technology to the music industry. zplane technologies are nowadays used by millions of musicians and producers world-wide in a wide variety of products.

Lerch has published more than 60 peer-reviewed publications on a wide range of topics in audio and music analysis and processing. His textbook "An Introduction to Audio Content Analysis" was published by Wiley/IEEE Press in 2012 (2nd edition in 2023).