Marie Curie individual fellowship application text

Back in 2014 I applied for a Marie Curie fellowship. This was towards the end of my postdoc at Oxford, and then I got my current position at Standard Chartered before I heard back from the European Commission on the results of the Marie Curie. It was accepted with a score of 96%, which is something I'm very proud of, and also very thankful to everyone who helped me prepare the submission.
However, it is now clear that I will not be taking that position, as I am settled in London and at Standard Chartered. I still quite like the proposal, though, and, when writing it, I remember having wanted to see examples of successful Marie Curie proposals to have an idea of what they would look like. As such, I'm making the text of my own Marie Curie fellowship application available online. I hope this can help others to write successful applications, and maybe some of its ideas can be taken on by other researchers. Feel free to adapt any of the ideas in the proposal (but please give credit when it is due, and remember that the European Commission uses plagiarism detection software). It's available on my website, and linked below. I made the LaTeX template for the application available before.

José Pedro Magalhães. Models of Structure in Music (MoStMusic). Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship application, 2014.

I got awarded a Marie Curie individual fellowship!

After over 5 months waiting, I heard back from the European Commission: my Marie Curie Individual Fellowship has been selected for funding! This means two years of funding for research at Utrecht University in my project. In case you're curious, here's an excerpt of the summary of my project proposal:

Music is an art form with a very long history, and continues to engage millions of people today. Music Information Retrieval (MIR), the exciting interdisciplinary science that brings together music and computer science, is a growing field of research with the potential to enrich pure computer science knowledge while creating real-world applications that the general public can benefit from. While the marriage of art and science is often troublesome, MIR has the benefit that many aspects of music are highly structural and have been subject to rigorous formalisation for a long time. Formalisation and computers go hand in hand, and MIR researchers have therefore been developing models of musical structure for many years, and putting them to use in several applications. However, such models, so far, have had limited impact; they are commonly restricted to one specific aspect of music (such as harmony or form), can be hard to implement computationally (due, for example, to the way ambiguity is handled), and are often too technical to be used directly by musicologists who are not familiar with programming language details.

However, models are valuable. Unlike machine learning approaches, model-based MIR provides a real insight about the underlying structure, and can benefit from the input of musicologist experts. Furthermore, a single model can be applied to multiple important MIR tasks (such as retrieval, analysis, and automatic composition). The research goal of this project is thus to give musical models the impact they deserve, advancing the practical embodiment of hierarchical musical structure—in its various forms—in computer science through the development of new, functional Models of Structure in Music (MoStMusic). Specifically, I intend to develop functional models of musical form, melody, and harmony that enable an easy, fast, and flexible way of creating model-enhanced MIR applications. Being executable, these models will pave the way for true content-based music analysis and retrieval---an underestimated and underexplored area. As a showcase of a model-enhanced application, I will create an online music analyser that automatically computes the structure present in a user-submitted piece, and displays it in an interactive interface that highlights the structural shape of music.

LaTeX template for the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships application (H2020-MSCA-IF-2014)

I've created  a LaTeX template for the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships application (H2020-MSCA-IF-2014). It's based on a version that I found online for the previous call; I've tried to update it for the 2014 call. I made this because I couldn't stand the idea of using the provided Word template (especially because of references). Hopefully it fits within the prescribed guidelines, but I cannot guarantee that. Pull requests to improve the template are welcome!

Edit: template has now been updated to the 2017 call by thevorpalblade.