Max Henry
Researcher interested in human-computer interaction, computer-assisted creativity, and audio machine learning. Audio developer. Musician. Nerd.
M.Sc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, McGill University (2025). Built a realtime suggestion engine for synthesizer sound design at the Shared Reality Lab. M.A. in Music Technology, McGill University (2021). Researched psychoacoustics at the Music Perception and Cognition Lab.
Theses
A Realtime Suggestion Engine for Computer-Assisted Sound Design (2025)
Autoencoder-based AI assistant that learns from expert synthesizer presets to provide
realtime parameter suggestions. User study showed 0.89 standard deviation improvement
in sound-matching tasks.
The design assistant in action. Each knob has a "live" value (small circle), as well as a "suggested" value (gray line). Suggestions react in realtime to the user, acting as creative scaffolding (hints/help), and to anticipate design intent. (An "accept" and "undo" button are not pictured.)
A Perceptual Study of Amplitude Modulation-Induced Vibrato (2021)
Psychoacoustic research on perceptual dimensions of amplitude modulation and pitch
perception (link).
Projects of Interest
Working on an autograd engine to learn about backprop, tensor calculus, and topological sort.
Contributed to torchsynth, a differentiable synthesizer in PyTorch (paper).
🏆 Built a phase vocoder plugin in MATLAB that won silver at the AES Student Plugin Competition.
Selected Publications
🏆 Lee, H., Jiang, R., Yoo, Y., Henry, M., & Cooperstock, J. R. (2022). "The Sound of Hallucinations: Toward a more convincing emulation of internalized voices." CHI '22: Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3501871 Honorable Mention CHI 2022
Turian, J., Shier, J., Tzanetakis, G., McNally, K., & Henry, M. (2021). "One Billion Audio Sounds from GPU-enabled Modular Synthesis." Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFx20in21). arXiv:2104.12922 (repo)
Turian, J. & Henry, M. (2020). "I'm sorry for your loss: Spectrally-based audio distances are bad at pitch." NeurIPS 2020 ICBINB Workshop. arXiv:2012.04572
Other
Founding member of SUUNS, toured internationally for over a decade. Some older music and compositions at maxhenrymusic.com. SOCAN Young Composers Award recipient for television scoring.
Latest from the Blog
February 14, 2026
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