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Dear all,

Instead of the previously announced seminar by Martyn Davies, today, on 
Wednesday, 9th May at 3:00pm, Bob Sturm will present the seminar 'Three 
experiments in music genre recognition'.

Please note that the talk will take place at BR.4.02 in the Computer 
Science building, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London 
E1 4NS.

Directions on how to access the building 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 I can make sure no-one is stuck 
outside the doors. Details of future seminars can be found at 
http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/newsevents/researchgroupevents.php?i=12.

If you wish to be added to / removed from our mailing list, please send me 
an email and I'll be happy to do so.


Wednesday's seminar (9th May, 3:00pm):

Title:

Three experiments in music genre recognition

Speaker:

Bob Sturm

Abstract:

During the past decade, many researchers have tackled the problem of 
making computers automatically recognize the genre of recorded music. This 
is an important problem because it can, among other things, ameliorate the 
deluge into large databases unlabeled, mislabeled, but always poorly 
labeled, audio data. The first published work in this area in 2001 
achieves a mean accuracy of 61% in ten different genres. Another work from 
2006 reaches 83% mean accuracy for this same dataset. And work from 2009 
and 2010 claims to observe 91% mean accuracy for this same dataset. With 
genre so difficult to define, and seemingly based on factors more broad 
than acoustics, these are remarkable results. In this talk, I argue from 
results of three simple experiments that the improvements we have seen are 
unfortunate consequences of excellent discrimination based on confounding 
factors having little to do with music genre.

Bio:

Bob L. Sturm received the B.A. degree in physics from University of 
Colorado, Boulder in 1998, the M.A. degree in Music, Science, and 
Technology, at Stanford University, in 1999, the M.S. degree in multimedia 
engineering in the Media Arts and Technology program at University of 
California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), in 2004, and finally the M.S. and Ph.D. 
degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering at UCSB, in 2007 and 2009, 
respectively. Dr. Sturm specializes in signal processing, sparse 
approximation, and their applications to audio and music. During 2009, Dr. 
Sturm was a Chateaubriand Post-doctoral Fellow at the Institut Jean Le 
Rond d'Alembert, Equipe Lutheries, Acoustique, Musique (LAM), at 
Université Pierre et Marie Curie, UPMC Paris 6. In January 2010, Dr. Sturm 
became Assistant Professor at the Department of Architecture, Design and 
Media Technology at Aalborg University Copenhagen. In 2011, he was awarded 
a two-year Independent Postdoc Grant from the Danish Agency for Science, 
Technology and Innovation, beginning January 2012. His current research 
interests are: digital signal processing for audio and music signals, 
algorithms for sparse approximation and compressive sampling, and music 
and audio information retrieval.





--
Peter Foster
Postgraduate Research Student
Room 104, Electronic Engineering Bldg
Centre for Digital Music
Queen Mary, University of London
Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK
email: [log in to unmask]