John Hicks
I research how machines listen to African popular music, and I make it. My work builds datasets and models for the rhythms, timbres and languages that Western-trained systems miss.
- Research assistant
- AIRLAB, University of Lagos
- Affiliated researcher
- AI Unipod, UNDP Nigeria
- Artist and producer
- Jotihicks
Data scientistMachine learning research engineerMusic information retrievalMachine learning for audio
01 — Recently
Recently…
- 2026
AFMGC dataset paper, under the supervision of Prof. Chika Yinka-Banjo, submitted for review to TISMIR.
Research - 2025-10
Released “Only You”, out now on Apple Music, YouTube Music and Deezer.
Music - 2024-07
Released “Medusa”, produced by Elbuzzi.
Music
02 — Research
Under review · TISMIR
African Music Genre Classifier (AFMGC)
Most music-information-retrieval corpora are built around Western repertoire, so models trained on them flatten a continent of music into “world”. AFMGC is an annotated corpus of African popular music and a deep-learning pipeline for genre classification, labelled by listener judgement rather than inherited metadata.
Full write-up Dataset (opens in a new tab)GitHub (opens in a new tab)
- Data
- 1,061 human-annotated 30-second clips, ten genres
- Features
- 91 acoustic descriptors per clip plus aligned Mel-spectrograms
- Models
- Classical and convolutional baselines
- Context
- PGD thesis, AIRLAB, University of Lagos
- 00Afrobeat
- 01Afrobeats
- 02Amapiano
- 03Highlife
- 04Mbalax
- 05Kwaito
- 06Soukous
- 07Jùjú
- 08Fújì
- 09Congolese Rumba
03 — Music
Songs I’ve written and recorded.
Only You (opens in a new tab)
Single · 2025
Medusa (opens in a new tab)
Single · 2024 · prod. Elbuzzi
Doo (opens in a new tab)
Single · 2023
After 7 (opens in a new tab)
Single · 2023 · 50k+ plays
Discography
- 2025Only You (opens in a new tab)Single
- 2024Medusa (opens in a new tab)Single
- 2023Doo (opens in a new tab)Single
- 2023After 7 (opens in a new tab)Single
- 2022Finally (opens in a new tab)Single
- 2022Nobody Misses You (opens in a new tab)Single
- 2021Joy On The Inside (opens in a new tab)Album · 7 tracks
- 2021Enemies (opens in a new tab)Single
- 2020Pleasantries (opens in a new tab)Album · 7 tracks
04 — Videos
Performances and visuals.
Turn Up
Music video
Medusa
Acoustic, in the studio
After 7
Lyric video
Acoustic session
Guitar and vocals
05 — About
John Hicks is…
1 a musician
Self-producing artist and audio engineer.
Recording since 2017, trained under producers including Semzi Beats, P.Priime and Sarz. I compose, record, mix and master my own music: about 301,000 plays on Audiomack.
2 a researcher
Music information retrieval and machine learning for audio.
Research assistant at AIRLAB, University of Lagos, under Prof. Chika Yinka-Banjo; affiliated researcher at AI Unipod (UNDP Nigeria); teaching assistant for data science and machine learning.
3 working toward
Representations that respect idiomatic specificity.
Self-supervised and low-resource methods for musical traditions existing corpora underrepresent, and whether models pre-trained on Western repertoire transfer to African music at all.
06 — Contact