Dr. Scott H. Hawley

Professor of Physics, Belmont University

Hello! I typically teach physics to audio engineering students (undergrads), and develop new software applications (often via machine learning) to help prepare them for the future. In 2017 I also started getting involved in "AI Ethics" and "Science, the Humanities and Religion" through a special grant program in Oxford, UK.

I used to do computational relativity and astrophysics, but it's been a while.

Google Scholar CV Dissertation

Dr. Scott Hawley

Teaching

Courses

PHY2010 - Physics for Audio Engineering
PHY2250 - Electronics & Circuit Theory
PHY/BSA 3895 - Deep Learning & AI Ethics [GitHub]
PHY3110 - Analytical Mechanics
PHY4410 - Survey of Advanced Physics

Teaching Resources

Interactive Physics Apps

Interactive apps for physics, audio, and electronics instruction

Acoustic Tool Suite

Specialized tools for acoustics education

Selected Publications

2026

MIDI-RAE-JEPA: Hierarchical Representation Learning and Generation for Symbolic Music

S.H. Hawley et al. | ISMIR 2026, Abu Dhabi | Under Review

Flow Where You Want: Adding Inference Controls to Pretrained (Latent) Flow Models

S.H. Hawley | ICLR 2026 Blogpost Track | Under Review

2025

Flow With What You Know: basic physics provides a 'fast, straight' way to get up to speed with flow-based generative models

S.H. Hawley | ICLR 2025 Blogpost Track | Best Blog Post Award | April 2025

2024

Narrative, Creativity, and Open Source in 'Back to Eden'

S.H. Hawley | Chapter in Faithful AI: Stories of Hope from 2045 | July 2024

Pictures Of MIDI: Controlled Music Generation via Graphical Prompts for Image-Based Diffusion Inpainting

S.H. Hawley | In submission | July 2024

Website • Demo

Individual Identification in Acoustic Recordings

E. Knight, T. Rhinehart, D. de Zqaan, M.J. Weldy, M. Cartwright, S.H. Hawley, et al. | Trends in Ecology and Evolution | April 2024

Fast Timing-Conditioned Latent Audio Diffusion

Z. Evans, CJ Carr, J. Taylor, S.H. Hawley, J. Pons | ICML 2024 (Oral) | July 2024

Operational Latent Spaces

S.H. Hawley and Austin R. Tackett | AES International Symposium on AI and the Musician | June 2024

Demo Website

Speaking

"Scrawl Me Maybe" with MIDI-RAE-JEPA-son

Invited Talk, AI Music Summit, Berklee College of Music, Boston MA | June 4, 2026

Practical Methods for Training Flow-Based Generative Models

Invited Talk, International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), Rome Italy | July 3, 2025

Large Language Models Are Stupid

Belmont Humanities Symposium | September 23, 2024

Out of the Heart, the Mouth Speaks: Modeling Generative Physical & Creative Processes

Keynote, Faith and Science Scholarship Symposium, Bethel University | April 6, 2024

Data, Compute, and Ethics: Navigating the Intersection of AI and Humanity

CCCU Multi-Academic 2 Conference | March 1, 2024

Contact

Address

Chemistry & Physics Dept
Belmont University
1900 Belmont Blvd
Nashville, TN 37212 USA

Office

Janet Ayers Academic Center (JAAC) 4008

Email

Phone

1-615-460-6206