This summer, two engineering students’ research helped pioneer a better way of connecting listeners with the music they like most.
Look out, Google — there’s a new music search engine at Stonehill.
Gustavo Lage ’26 and Sam Stahl ’27 have spent their summer building a search tool algorithm that can help users identify their favorite music between millions of tracks on YouTube or other online music databases.
“We’re looking for personal music preference hidden patterns that you wouldn’t be able to find just by listening to music on your own,” said Stahl, an electrical engineering major.
Lage and Stahl’s research began as an in-class project for the Signals and Systems course taught by Shahrokh Sani, an associate professor of engineering. He is the students’ faculty mentor in the SURE program.
“At the end of the semester, Sam and Gus approached me and said they were really interested to continue working on their class project in more depth,” he said. “There isn’t a lot of research about people's music preferences.”
Lage and Stahl’s task began with a survey for friends and family, asking them to identify their five most and least favorite songs. They then analyzed songs in time and frequency domains using MATLAB software — hands-on experience that Sani notes is a “high demand skill” among employers.
“Working in a research environment was new to me,” said Lage, who is majoring in computer engineering. “Learning how to do things like collect and analyze data will be very valuable to me in the future.”
According to Stahl, there are multiple ways the pair’s research could potentially be applied in the real world.
“As a search engine, it could cut down the amount of time it takes for people to find new music they like. It also could give them recommendations for new music that they may enjoy and wouldn’t find on their own.”
He continued: “Artists also could use this research to help them identify which songs their audience likes the most, to help them create more likable and commercially successful music in the future.”
(And Lage notes that, if the duo has their way, you may even see their work in an app store someday.)
According to Sani, research opportunities like those offered by the SURE program are invaluable for students — both personally and professionally.
“When students see how a concept they learned in class is applied in the real world, they not only understand the topic better but can visualize how their learning can have a real-world impact,” he said.
“The Digital Signal Processing techniques they’ve learned in this research can be applied in any field,” he continued. “That will open a lot of new doors for them in whatever they want to pursue after graduation.”
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