INVITED TALKS - Special SIGMUS Symposium
@ University of Tokyo, Japan on Nov 2, 2009.

The Invited Talk Session of the SIGMUS Special Symposium (Nov 2, 2009 @ Univ. of Tokyo)
will feature the following five talks from established researchers in the field of music 
information research. Details of the program will be updated soon. 

Invited Talk Session 1 (13:00 - 14:20)
"The Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London"
Simon Dixon (Queen Mary University of London, UK) 
[abstract][bio]

"Audio Research Group at Tampere University of Technology, Finland"
Anssi Klapuri (Tampere University of Technology, Finland) 
[abstract][bio]


Invited Talk Session 2 (14:35 - 16:35)
"Sound analysis/synthesis team and music indexing activities at IRCAM" 
Geoffroy Peeters (IRCAM, France) 
[abstract][bio]

"The Music Technology Group of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona"  
Xavier Serra (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain)
[abstract][bio]

 "Finding Music on the Web: A Yahoo Perspective"
Malcolm Slaney (Yahoo! Research, USA) 
[abstract][bio]



Abstracts of the invited talks 

"The Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London"
Simon Dixon (Queen Mary University of London, UK) 

The Centre for Digital Music (C4DM) at Queen Mary University of London 
is a world-leading multidisciplinary research group in the field of 
audio and music technology, consisting of around 50 full-time members 
(academic staff, postdoctoral researchers and postgraduate students).  
Our research covers a wide range of topics related to music synthesis, 
analysis, processing, production, delivery and retrieval, including the 
fields of music informatics, music signal processing, audio engineering, 
machine listening, interactive music systems and auditory display. 
Computational techniques at the heart of the Centre's research include 
time-frequency and time-scale analysis, neural networks, hidden Markov 
models, dynamic Bayesian networks, matching pursuits, transient analysis, 
independent component analysis, blind source separation, sparse 
representations and knowledge discovery, which have been applied to 
problems as diverse as automatic music transcription, beat tracking, 
audio alignment, music segmentation, automatic mixing, music 
recommendation, instrument identification and automatic musical 
accompaniment.  Another particular focus of the group has been on 
semantic audio, and more recently the semantic web for music, where we 
have played a leading role in the development of the Music Ontology.  In 
this talk I will give an overview of research at C4DM, making particular 
mention of recent results from the OMRAS-2 (Online Music Recommendation 
and Searching 2) project. 

"Audio Research Group at Tampere University of Technology, Finland"
Anssi Klapuri (Tampere University of Technology, Finland) 

Audio Research Group at Tampere University of Technology, Finland, 
consists of a bit less than 20 people working on various aspects of 
audio signal processing.  This talk introduces the group's activity on 
music signal processing and analysis. First, some applications of music 
transcription are introduced. A semiautomatic transcription tool is 
demonstrated which allows the user to write the score of a piece with 
the help of automatic analysis tools. Other applications include music 
retrieval and a karaoke system where the melody of a music piece is 
removed and the user's voice is tuned to replace that. Another topic 
discussed is music structure analysis. A method is introduced which 
segments a piece into parts and tries to recognise their names, such as 
"verse" or "chorus". In the latter half of the talk, the group's recent 
work on sound source modeling and separation is discussed.  This 
comprises both spectral modeling and modeling of the temporal evolution 
of musical sounds. For sound separation, a method is presented which 
combines a structured source model with multipitch estimation and 
non-negative matrix factorization to handle complex polyphonic music 
signals. 

"Sound analysis/synthesis team and music indexing activities at IRCAM"
Geoffroy Peeters (IRCAM, France) 

IRCAM (Institute of Research and Coordination in Acoustic/ Music) was 
created in 1977 by the French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez. 
Ircam is both a research and a music creation centre. The research and 
development department welcome over 90 researchers in various fields 
related to music: instrument acoustic, room acoustic, digital signal 
processing, computer science (language, real-time system, user interface 
and database), musicology, music representation, music cognition and 
perception, sound design. 

Ircam is both connected to university -- by welcoming two Masters diploma 
and numerous PHD students -- and to the industry -- by producing over 6 
professional softwares -- and by collaborating with many private 
companies (Renault, Orange, Creative Labs, MakeMusic, Thomson, EMI, Sony). 
The sound analysis/synthesis team focus on the use of digital signal 
processing for music creations. Algorithms are developed for signal 
re-synthesis (sinusoidal modelling), synthesis from scratch (Chant 
synthesis), signal modifications (phase vocoder, p-sola) or 
text-to-speech (corpus-based concatenative synthesis). These 
technologies are currently used by composers, by sound designers, in 
movie or games production. 

Activities related to music indexing started in 1998, with the 
Studio-On-Line project, the first online large-sound-database with 
search-by-content facilities. Over the years and the successive national 
or European projects (Cuidado, SemanticHIFI, Quaero) Ircam has developed 
technologies for content-description related to most music facets: 
multi-pitch, beat, down-beat, meter, chords, key/ mode, music structure, 
singing voice, music genre/ mood/ tag, sound/music similarity using 
various methods ranging from low-level, to score estimation and source 
separation methods. Content-description relies on a large part on 
annotated data. Recent research activities focus on the development of 
annotation concepts and collection suitable for audio indexing and 
musically relevant for nowadays music. Content-description is commonly 
used for facilitating data access, it can also be used for sound 
creation or modification as was studied in the Orchestration project or 
is used in corpus-based concatenative music synthesis (musaicing). In 
this talk, we will review these various activities of Ircam.               

"The Music Technology Group of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona"  
Xavier Serra (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain)

The Music Technology Group (MTG) of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in 
Barcelona, part of its Department of Information and Communication 
Technologies and of its Audiovisual Institute, is specialized in sound 
and music computing. With more than 40 researchers coming from different 
and complementary disciplines, the MTG carries out research on topics 
such as sound processing and synthesis; music content description; 
interactive music systems; computational models of perceptual and music 
cognition; and the technologies related with music social networks. The 
MTG wants to contribute to the improvement of the technologies related 
to sound and music communication, carrying out competitive research at 
the international level and at the same time transferring its results to 
society. To that goal, the MTG aims at finding a balance between basic 
and applied research and at the same time promotes interdisciplinary 
approaches that incorporate knowledge from both scientific/technological 
and humanistic/artistic disciplines. 

In this talk I will first overview the different research lines of the 
MTG and then I will talk about one of our latest projects: Freesound.org, 
which is a platform for the open exchange of sounds. With more than 1 
million registered users, 75thousand sounds in the database, and 
averaging 30 thousand visitors a day, this site is becoming much more 
than just a repository of sounds. By including social networking 
services, technologies for automatic tagging and for content based 
searching, support for research and artistic uses, and by promoting 
projects that built on that to experiment with collaborative production 
ideas, Freesound.org is a great platform to explore and develop new 
social networking concepts. In this talk I will analyze and describe 
Freesound.org, both from a technical and a social perspective, and I 
will present ideas for its future development. In particular I will 
introduce the idea of Music 3.0, concept based on the integration of the 
most recent technologies of the Web 2.0, advance on-line tools for music 
creation, and large sound and music repositories. 

 "Finding Music on the Web: A Yahoo Perspective"
Malcolm Slaney (Yahoo! Research, USA) 

Without a doubt the Internet has changed the way people consume music.  
But it also brings a wealth of data and new opportunities for 
music-information retrieval services. Our goal is to connect users with 
their entertainment and information needs. 

The data is both plentiful and noisy.  We have billions of ratings by 
users about their musical interests.  One one hand the the large amount 
of data means we can build robust models.  On the other hand, the data 
does come from people, with all their idiosyncratic behavior and 
opinions.  This wealth of personal data---we have to assume it is all 
correct---sometimes means what we think it means, and other times 
represents personal behaviors unrelated to anybody else's opinion.  
Separating out the signal from the noise is the new frontier for web 
sciences. 

I'll illustrate my talk with several kinds of technologies we find 
interesting, drawing from successes we have had from all types of 
multimedia.  These approaches impact recommendations, tagging, and 
search.  The frontiers of web science are wonderful. 



Bios of the invited speakers 

Simon Dixon (Queen Mary University of London, UK) 
Simon Dixon is a lecturer in the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary
University of London. He received BSc and PhD degrees in computer science from
the University of Sydney, and AMusA and LMusA diplomas in classical guitar.
He was a lecturer at Flinders University of South Australia (1994-1999) and
then a research scientist at the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial
Intelligence (1999-2006). His research interests focus on the extraction and
processing of musical (particularly rhythmic and harmonic) content in audio
signals, including beat tracking, onset detection, alignment, automatic
transcription, and the measurement and visualisation of expression in music
performance.

Anssi Klapuri (Tampere University of Technology, Finland) 
Anssi Klapuri received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Tampere 
University of Technology (TUT), Tampere, Finland, in 1998 and 2004, 
respectively. In 2005, he spent six months at the Ecole Centrale de 
Lille, Lille, France, working on music signal processing. In 2006, he 
spent three months visiting the Signal Processing Laboratory of 
Cambridge Univerisity, Cambridge, U.K. He is currently heading the Audio 
Research Group at the Department of Signal Processing, TUT.  His 
research interests include audio signal processing, auditory modeling, 
and machine learning. 

Geoffroy Peeters (IRCAM, France) 
Geoffroy Peeters is a researcher at IRCAM (Institute of Research and 
Coordination in Acoustic and Music) in Paris, France and is currently 
leading the music indexing research activities in the Quaero project. He 
received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University Paris VI, 
France in 2001 during which he developed new signal processing 
algorithms for speech and audio processing. Since then, his research 
focus on signal processing and pattern matching applied to audio and 
music indexing: timbre description, sound classification, audio 
identification, rhythm description, music structure discovery, audio 
summary and music genre / mood recognition. He is co-author of the ISO 
MPEG-7 audio standard. 

Xavier Serra (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain)
Xavier Serra is the head of the Music Technology Group of the
Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. After a multidisciplinary
academic education he obtained a PhD in Computer Music from Stanford
University in 1989 with a dissertation on the spectral processing of
musical sounds that is considered a key reference in the field. His
research interests cover the understanding, modeling and generation of
musical signals by computational means, with a balance between basic and
applied research and approaches from both scientific/technological and
humanistic/artistic disciplines.

Malcolm Slaney (Yahoo! Research, USA) 
Malcolm Slaney is a principal scientist at Yahoo! Research Laboratory. 
He received his PhD from Purdue University for his work on computed 
imaging. He is a coauthor, with A. C. Kak, of the IEEE book "Principles 
of Computerized Tomographic Imaging." This book was recently 
republished by SIAM in their "Classics in Applied Mathematics" Series. 
He is coeditor, with Steven Greenberg, of the book "Computational 
Models of Auditory Function." Before Yahoo!, he has worked at Bell 
Laboratory, Schlumberger Palo Alto Research, Apple Computer, Interval 
Research and IBM's Almaden Research Center. He is also a (consulting) 
Professor at Stanford's CCRMA, where he organizes and teaches the 
Hearing Seminar. His research interests include auditory modeling and 
perception, multimedia analysis and synthesis, music similarity and 
audio search, and machine learning. For the last several years he has 
lead the auditory group at the Telluride Neuromorphic Workshop.    



Program co-chairs:
  Takuya Fujishima, Yamaha
  Masataka Goto, AIST
  Keiichiro Hoashi, KDDI R&D Laboratories
  
Local organizer:
  Shigeki Sagayama, University of Tokyo

Contact e-mail: sigmus200911[at]qwik.itri.aist.go.jp 

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