Alexander Lerch is Associate Dean for Research and Creative Practice and Associate Professor at the School of Music, Georgia Institute of Technology. His research focuses on design and implementation of novel machine learning and signal processing approaches targeting audio and music.
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. In 2013, Lerch joined the Georgia Institute of Technology at the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, where he leads the Music Informatics Group.
Lerch has published more than 60 peer-reviewed publications on a wide range of topics in audio and music analysis and processing. His widely used textbook “An Introduction to Audio Content Analysis” was published by Wiley/IEEE Press in 2012. Lerch had visiting appointments at the Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and ShanghaiTech University, and served as co-chair of ISMIR2021, the 22nd International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference. He also serves as a Research Ambassador for the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service).