Tag Archives: press

Un mes irrepetible / A unique month

Yes, last month has been so unique for me that I wanted to share it with a post.

ISMIR 2014

ismir

From October 27th to November 1st, I attended the 15h International Conference of Music Information Retrieval in Taipei, Taiwan. ISMIR is by far my favorite conference, where I meet most of my colleagues, get to know the advancements in the field, and get fresh ideas for my research. This year, it was a busy edition for me. We presented some work related to the PHENICX project, where we try to apply MIR techniques for classical music, in particular for symphonic repertoire and within the context of a concert, so including real-time description. In addition, we had several meetings of the society board, where I take part as a member. Finally, I was co-authoring a poster on the robustness of low-level features, another one on melodic similarity of flamenco music, in the scope of our COFLA project, and presenting a demo of our MIR.EDU library for music education! A lot for a single week!

proxy  It was a great conference: amazing city and landscape, very good organization, nice presentations and research outcomes, and good perspectives for next year in Málaga, Spain.

After coming back from ISMIR, I had my tenured defense on November 5th. After some years working at UPF and a long waiting period due to economic restrictions, I got tenured assistant professor thanks to the Serra Hunter program of the Catalan government. I am really happy for that!

One week later, this Wednesday, I attended a workshop in Madrid that the Spanish Association of Symphonic Orchestras (AEOS) and BBVA foundation devoted, in its first day, to the new challenges and opportunities that technology offers for orchestras. I presented the PHENICX project, including use cases and the technologies that the different partners are researching and developping, integrated in our prototype. You can find here my slides and complementary material. It has already appeared in press.

Although we are not far from summer, I now feel I need some rest!

Leave a comment

Filed under events, news

Video of my keynote talk at the 3rd International Workshop on Folk Music Analysis 2013

This is the video of my keynote talk at FMA 2013, titled “Towards Computer-Assisted Transcription and Description of Music Recordings”. This is the abstract of the talk. I hope you will like it!

Automatic transcription, i.e. computing a symbolic musical representation from a music recording, is one of the main research challenges in the field of sound and music computing. For monophonic music material the obtained transcription is a single musical line, usually a melody, and in polyphonic music there is an interest in transcribing the predominant melodic line. In addition to transcribing, current technologies are able to extract other musical descriptions related to tonality, rhythm or instrumentation from music recordings. Automatic description could potentially complement traditional methodologies for music analysis.

In this talk I present the state-of-the art on automatic transcription and description of music audio signals. I illustrate it with our own research on tonality estimation, melodic transcription and rhythmic characterization. I show that, although current research is promising, current algorithms are still limited in accuracy and there is a semantic gap between automatic feature extractors and expert analyses.
Moreover, I present some strategies to address these challenges by developing methods adapted to different repertoire and defining strategies to integrate expert knowledge into computational models, as a way to build systems following a “computer-assisted” paradigm.

Leave a comment

12/07/2013 · 12:56