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Dear all,

This Friday, May 23rd at 2:00pm, Eric Humphrey of New York University, will speak on "Deep Learning in Music Informatics: New Directions for the Next Decade".

The talk will take place in ENG 209 in the Engineering Building, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS.

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:

Eric Humphrey

Title:

Deep Learning in Music Informatics: New Directions for the Next Decade

Abstract:

As we look to the future of content-based music informatics, there is a general sense that progress is decelerating throughout the field. On closer inspection, performance trajectories across several applications reveal that this is more than just a feeling, raising some difficult questions: why are we slowing down, and what can we do about it? This talk aims to address both of these issues. First, common approaches to music signal analysis are reviewed in an effort to fully understand why this might be the case, and three specific deficiencies to current methods are identified: hand-crafted feature design is sub-optimal and unsustainable, the power of shallow architectures is fundamentally limited, and short-time analysis cannot encode musically meaningful structure. Acknowledging breakthroughs in other perceptual AI domains, the case is made that deep learning holds the potential to overcome each of these obstacles. Through conceptual arguments for feature learning and deeper processing architectures, it will be demonstrated how deep processing models are simply more powerful extensions of many current methods, and why now is the time for this paradigm shift.

Bio:

Eric is a PhD candidate (ABD) in Music Technology at the Music and Audio Research Lab (MARL) @ NYU. After earning a BSEE at Syracuse University in 2007, Eric flocked south to pursue a masters in Music Engineering Technology at the University of Miami, graduating in 2009. During the completion of his master's thesis, Eric fell in love with both music informatics and New York City; as luck would have it, he now spends his days in the Village, striving to make machines more musically intelligent. In addition to the working toward finally finishing his dissertation, Eric is a multi-instrumentalist, has been a visiting lecturer at the University of Miami, worked as an independent contractor for several audio technology companies, spent a summer doing research at Google, and currently serves on the ISMIR Board as its student representative.