My three PhD students, Justin Salamon, Jose R. Zapata and Agustín Martorell, graduated last September. We had an intense week with the three defenses and a wonderful panel of experts for the jury. These are three very nice pieces of work and very different and varied in terms of contributions and scopes.

• Agustín Martorell, “Modelling tonal context dynamics by temporal multi-scale analysis”. Jury members: Petri Toiviainen (University of Jyväskylä), Geoffroy Peeters (IRCAM), Sergi Jordà (UPF). This thesis provides nice insights on the concept of tonality and its computational modelling, discussing the different proposals for visualization and evaluation and proposing a new approach based on temporal multi-scale.
• José R. Zapata “Comparative Evaluation and Combination of Automatic Rhythm Description Systems”. Jury members: Fabien Gouyon (INESC-Porto), Juan Bello (NYU), Xavier Serra (UPF). The work by Jose is extremely important as it provides a quantitative evaluation of state of the art methods for rhythm description (tempo and beat tracking), a way to automatically detect difficult examples, and propose a way to combine different strategies in different contexts (tracks, onset detection functions and beat tracking model) to address the current glass ceiling in those methods.
• Justin Salamon. “Melody Extraction from Polyphonic Music Signals”. Jury Members: Geoffroy Peeters (IRCAM), Fabien Gouyon (INESC-Porto), Juan Bello (NYU). The thesis by Justin is an excellent contribution to the field of music content description, in particular predominang fundamental frequency estimation, including the MELODIA algorithm and many applications to evaluate and exploit the method.

I learned a lot by supervising the three of them, I am now happy that they succeed. I hope we will keep collaborating and I wish them all the best in their future careers!