PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Chris Donahue

Chris Donahue is an AI researcher who develops models and interactive tools for making music. He grew up playing piano and drums, studied computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, and completed a PhD at UC San Diego before starting a Stanford postdoc with Percy Liang in 2019. His work includes Dance Dance Convolution for music-game choreography, WaveGAN for audio synthesis, and Piano Genie for improvising with eight buttons. He helped launch Beat Sage in 2020, co-authored SingSong in 2023, and contributed to Magenta RealTime in 2025. He is the Dannenberg Assistant Professor in Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Science Department, leads its Generative Creativity Lab, and works part-time on Google DeepMind's Magenta team.

Works
84
Citations
4,363
h-index
17
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 27 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. By 2013

    Music and computer science

    He grows up playing piano and drums and studies computer science at the University of Texas at Austin. In December 2013, he completes the undergraduate honors thesis “Applications of Genetic Programming to Digital Audio Synthesis,” which uses genetic programming to make sound synthesis algorithms mimic acoustic and electronic instruments.

  2. 2017

    Dance Dance Convolution

    In 2017, he coauthors Dance Dance Convolution with Zachary C. Lipton and Julian McAuley. The system learns to turn an audio track into a Dance Dance Revolution step chart, using neural networks to decide when to place steps and which steps to select.

  3. 2019

    WaveGAN and Piano Genie

    His 2019 ICLR paper with Julian McAuley and Miller Puckette introduces WaveGAN, which uses generative adversarial networks to synthesize audio waveforms. Piano Genie, published with Ian Simon and Sander Dieleman in 2019, uses recurrent neural networks to let people improvise piano music through eight buttons.

  4. 2019

    A doctorate and Stanford

    His UC San Diego PhD, jointly advised by Miller Puckette in music and Julian McAuley in computer science, includes a 2019 dissertation on music, AI and interaction. In 2019, he starts a postdoc in Stanford University's Computer Science Department, advised by Percy Liang.

  5. April 2020

    Launching Beat Sage

    In April 2020, he and Abhay Agarwal launch Beat Sage. The service uses AI and neural networks to generate custom Beat Saber maps from songs.

  6. July 2020

    Language models fill blanks

    At ACL in July 2020, he coauthors “Enabling Language Models to Fill in the Blanks” with Mina Lee and Percy Liang. Their method trains language models to fill missing passages within documents and tests sentence completion in short stories, scientific abstracts and lyrics.

  7. 2022–2023

    Google Magenta and SingSong

    In 2022, he becomes a research scientist at Google Magenta. In January 2023, he coauthors SingSong, a system that generates instrumental music to accompany a person's singing by adapting AudioLM and training on separated vocal and instrumental tracks.

  8. 2023–2024

    A professorship at Carnegie Mellon

    He joins Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science faculty in 2023 as an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department. In 2024, he becomes the first recipient of the Dannenberg Career Development Professorship, established by Roger Dannenberg to support research and teaching in computation and music.

  9. 2025

    Live music with Magenta

    In 2025, he coauthors Live Music Models, which introduces models that produce a continuous stream of music with live user control. The team releases Magenta RealTime, an open-weights model that users can steer with text or audio prompts.

  10. As of October 2026

    Music AI at CMU

    As of October 2026, he is the Dannenberg Assistant Professor in Carnegie Mellon's Computer Science Department and leads the Generative Creativity Lab (G-CLef). He also works part-time as a research scientist on Google DeepMind's Magenta team, developing generative AI for music and creative interaction.

Career

  1. NowCarnegie Mellon UniversityDannenberg Assistant Professor, Computer Science, Lead, Generative Creativity Lab (G-CLef)
  2. NowGoogle DeepMindPart-Time Research Scientist, Magenta Team
  3. 2022–2023GoogleResearch Scientist, Magenta Team
  4. 2019–2023Stanford UniversityPostdoctoral Researcher, Computer Science

Education

  1. 2019University of California, San DiegoPhD
  2. University of Texas at AustinUndergraduate studies in computer science

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Chris Donahue yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Singing a New Tune: Computational Music — The Link - The Magazine of the Kenneth C. Griffin School of Computer Science magazine.cs.cmu.edu. Checked 27 October 2026.
  2. Peter Stone :: Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, Department of Computer Science :: Students cs.utexas.edu. Checked 27 October 2026.
  3. Dance Dance Convolution proceedings.mlr.press. Checked 27 October 2026.
  4. Adversarial Audio Synthesis | Chris Donahue chrisdonahue.com. Checked 27 October 2026.
  5. Piano Genie | Chris Donahue chrisdonahue.com. Checked 27 October 2026.
  6. Chris Donahue | Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science Department csd.cmu.edu. Checked 27 October 2026.
  7. Chris Donahue chrisdonahue.com. Checked 27 October 2026.
  8. Machine Learning Group statsml.stanford.edu. Checked 27 October 2026.
  9. Get Rhythm: How Beat Sage Uses AI To Create Beat Saber Maps uploadvr.com. Checked 27 October 2026.
  10. Enabling Language Models to Fill in the Blanks - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 27 October 2026.
  11. SingSong: Generating Musical Accompaniments from Singing | Chris Donahue chrisdonahue.com. Checked 27 October 2026.
  12. SCS Faculty Receive Endowed Professorships | Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science Department csd.cs.cmu.edu. Checked 27 October 2026.
  13. G-CLef @ CMU gclef-cmu.org. Checked 27 October 2026.
  14. Chris Donahue chrisdonahue.com. Checked 27 October 2026.