** The Music and Science list is managed by the Institute of Musical Research (www.music.sas.ac.uk) as a bulletin board and discussion forum for researchers working at the shared boundaries of science and music. ** MESSAGE FOLLOWS: Reminder: this seminar will take place tomorrow afternoon, Friday May 2nd. Also a note about the timing: the two talks will take 1h30 altogether, with each speaker taking 45 minutes including questions. There will be a brief break between speakers. On 22/04/2014 15:38, Jordan Smith wrote: > Dear all, > > On Friday, May 2nd at 2:00pm, Johanna Devaney and Michael Mandel, of > Ohio State University, will present two seminars back-to-back, > entitled "Analyzing recorded vocal performances" and "Strong models > for understanding sounds in mixtures", respectively, in ENG 2.09 (the > Engineering building) at Queen Mary University of London, Mile End > Road, London E1 4NS. Details of the talks follow. > > Information on how to access the school can be found at > http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/about/campus-map.php. If you are coming > from outside Queen Mary, please let me know, so that I can provide > detailed directions and make sure no-one is stuck outside the doors. > If you wish to be added to / removed from our mailing list as an > individual recipient, please send me an email and I'll be happy to do so. > > ** > > Speaker 1: Johanna Devaney > > Title: Analyzing Recorded Vocal Performances > > Abstract: > > A musical performance can convey both the musicians’ interpretation of > the written musical score as well as emphasize, or even manipulate, > the emotional content of the music through small variations in timing, > dynamics, tuning, and timbre. This talk presents my work on > score-guided automatic musical performance analysis, as well as my > investigations into vocal intonation practices. The score-audio > alignment algorithm I developed to estimate note locations makes use > of a hybrid DTW-HMM multi-pass approach that is able to capture onset > and offset asynchronies between simultaneously notated chords in > polyphonic music. My work on vocal intonation practices has examined > both solo and ensemble singing, with a particular focus on the role of > musical training, the presence and/or type of accompaniment, and the > organization of musical materials on intonation. > > Bio: > > Johanna Devaney is an assistant professor of music theory and > cognition at The Ohio State University. Her research applies a range > of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of musical performance, > motivated by a desire to understand how performers mediate listeners’ > experience of music. Her work on extracting and analyzing performance > data, with a particular focus on intonation in the singing voice, > integrates the fields of music theory, music perception and cognition, > signal processing, and machine learning. She has released a number of > the tools she has developed in the open-source Automatic Music > Performance and Comparison Toolkit (www.ampact.org). Johanna completed > her PhD at the Schulich School of Music of McGill University. She also > holds an M.Phil. degree from Columbia University, as well as an MA > from York University in Toronto. Before working at Ohio State, she was > a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for New Music and Audio > Technologies (CNMAT) at the University of California, Berkeley. > > ** > > Speaker 2: Michael Mandel > > Title: Strong models for understanding sounds in mixtures > > Abstract: > > Human abilities to understand sounds in mixtures, for example, speech > in noise, far outstrip current automatic approaches, despite recent > technological breakthroughs. This talk presents two projects that use > strong models of speech to begin to close this gap and discusses their > implications for musical applications. The first project investigates > the human ability to understand speech in noise using a new > data-driven paradigm. By formulating intelligibility prediction as a > classification problem, the model is able to learn the important > spectro-temporal features of speech utterances from the results of > listening test using real speech. It is also able to successfully > generalize to new recordings of the same and similar words. The second > project aims to reconstruct damaged or obscured speech similarly to > the way humans might, by using a strong prior model. In this case, the > prior model is a full large vocabulary continuous speech recognizer. > Posed as an optimization problem, this system finds the latent clean > speech features that minimize a combination of the distance to the > reliable regions of the noisy observation and the negative log > likelihood under the recognizer. It reduces both speech recognition > errors and the distance between the estimated speech and the original > clean speech. > > Bio: > > Michael I Mandel earned his BSc in Computer Science from the > Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004 and his MS and PhD with > distinction in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University in 2006 > and 2010 as a Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Sciences > Presidential Scholar. From 2009 to 2010 he was an FQRNT Postdoctoral > Research Fellow in the Machine Learning laboratory at the Université > de Montréal. From 2010 to 2012 he was an Algorithm Developer at > Audience Inc, a company that has shipped over 350 million noise > suppression chips for cell phones. He is currently a Research > Scientist in Computer Science and Engineering at the Ohio State > University where he recently received an Outstanding Undergraduate > Research Mentor award. His research applies signal processing and > machine learning to computational audition problems including source > separation, robust speech recognition, and music classification and > tagging. > > > Other upcoming C4DM Seminars: > > Richard Foss (Rhodes University), Thursday 1 May 2014, 2:00pm ("The > delights and dilemmas associated with sending audio over networks") > Matt McVicar (AIST Japan), Monday 12 May 2014, 3:30pm ("Towards the > automatic transcription of lyrics from audio") > Paul Weir (Aardvark Swift Recruitment, Audio director of Soho > Productions), Wednesday 21 May 2014, 3:00pm >