Monday, January 25, 2021

Fwd: Invitation to participate: measuring perceived tension in music

Dear all,


We are building a computational implementation of musical tension and are looking for hearing unimpaired volunteers to evaluate it.


We invite you to participate in a listening study which involves recording the degree of tension you perceive while listening to short clips of music.


The study will take 10-15 minutes to complete.


We recommend using a laptop or PC, rather than a mobile phone, with a mouse or similar device.


You can access the study at: 


https://survey.alchemer.eu/s3/90306297/A-survey-on-perceived-musical-tension


Many thanks.


Best wishes,

Germán Ruiz-Marcos

Open University (UK)

Monday, January 11, 2021

Fwd: [DMRN-LIST] [CFP] 2nd International Workshop on the Internet of Sounds






2nd International Workshop on the Internet of Sounds

(part of Audio Mostly 2021)

 

September 1-3, 2021. Trento, Italy

 

< Apologies for cross-posting >

< Please distribute >

 

Call for papers and demos

 

After the success of the first edition, we are pleased to invite the community to submit to the 2nd International Workshop on the Internet of Sounds (IWIS 2021). The Internet of Sounds is an emerging research field positioned at the intersection of the Internet of Things and Sound and Music Computing domains. The workshop will be hosted at the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science of University of Trento.


The aim of the workshop is to bring together academics and industry to investigate and advance the development of Internet of Sounds technologies by using cutting-edge tools and processes. The event will consist of presentations from academics and keynotes, poster presentations, demonstrations, as well as tutorials.


Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following areas:

  • Wireless acoustic sensor networks
  • Detection and classification of sounds in acoustic sensor networks
  • Visualization and Sonification of acoustic sensor networks
  • Ecoacoustics
  • Privacy and security in acoustic sensor networks 
  • Smart Musical Instruments
  • Musical haptics for the Internet of Musical Things
  • Participatory live music performances
  • Networked music performances
  • Music education applications for the Internet of Musical Things
  • Intelligent music production in Internet of Musical Things contexts
  • Ubiquitous music
  • Web Audio for the Internet of Sounds
  • Spatial audio for the Internet of Sounds
  • Sonification for Internet of Sounds applications
  • Protocols and exchange formats for the Internet of Sounds
  • Improving accessibility and inclusiveness within the Internet of Sounds
  • Open audio databases for Deep Learning and Data Mining
  • Challenges in the management and delivery of large audio databases
  • Visualization, access and indexing of audio databases
  • Cloud-based services for musical and audio applications


We consider contributions in the form of a full paper (min 5 pages, max 8 pages), a poster paper (min 2 pages, max 4 pages), or a demo proposal (max 2 pages). Authors are welcome to submit to all three tracks. We encourage the submission of work in progress as well as more mature work.

 

The event is being run alongside the Audio Mostly Conference (https://audiomostly.com/) an interdisciplinary conference also hosted at the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science of University of Trento between 1 and 3 of September. The participants to the workshop will have access to all the sessions of the Audio Mostly conference.

The paper templates are available at https://audiomostly.com/2021/call/instructions/

 

Important dates

  • Papers and demos submission deadline: May 1, 2021
  • Author notification: June 15, 2021
  • Camera ready due: July 15, 2021
  • Workshop dates: September 1-3, 2021

 

Publications

 

All accepted full papers will appear in the proceedings of the Audio Mostly Conference. They will be included in the ACM Digital Library and will be indexed by Scopus, ACM, Web of Science, and DBLP. 

 

Awards

 

The Organizing Committee will select the winners for the Best Paper, Best Student Paper and Best Demo awards. To be eligible for the best student paper award, the presenting and first author of the paper must be a full-time student.

 

 

Organizing Committee

  • Luca Turchet (University of Trento)
  • Mathieu Lagrange (University of Nantes)
  • Chris Chafe (Stanford University)
  • Victor Lazzarini (Maynooth University)
  • Carlo Fischione (KTH Royal Institute of Technology)
  • Paolo Casari (University of Trento)

 

Logistics


Registration: https://audiomostly.com/2021/info/registration/

How to reach the venue: https://audiomostly.com/2021/info/info-attendees/



-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Luca Turchet
Assistant Professor
Head of the Creative, Intelligent & Multisensory Interactions Laboratory

Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science
University of Trento
Via Sommarive 9 - 38123 Trento - Italy

Tel: +39 0461 283792

Tuesday, January 5, 2021

IFA: May The Arts Bring You Hope And Healing In 2021

source: https://indiaifa.org/whats-new/may-arts-bring-you-hope-and-healing-2021.html


May The Arts Bring You Hope And Healing In 2021

Many of us are glad to bid farewell to 2020 - a year that took away so
much that was precious to us. We lost friends, freedoms, certainties,
and the warmth of contact. Grappling with these many griefs, we have
somewhat hurtled down the last few days of December, hoping that the
beginning of yet another random cycle of time will bring with it hope
and peace. Many are counting on the vaccine, some on the disease to
reduce its ferocity, and others on the generosity of the universe to
allow us the strength to continue our journeys.

In all of this, at IFA, we have held on to each other and continued to
do our best for the arts and culture communities that we are committed
to serving. If we reflect on what we have learnt, three things stand
out. Firstly, as human beings, we have a huge capacity for courage,
empathy and compassion that we must employ on our ordinary days as
much as we do when faced with trying times. Secondly, the pandemic has
thrown away our blindfolds to the inequalities in the world that stare
at us asking questions we must collectively imagine answers for.
Lastly, artists once again have come out as healers of a broken world
and hope makers of the future, offering joy and solace to all those
feeling lost and alone during these trying times.

We share these learnings with you because you too have touched us with
the art you create and the kindness of your spirit – with messages of
encouragement, generous contributions, and undying faith in the work
we do. We hope the New Year is one that brings us the healing touch we
need and may we continue to work hard for an equal and just world.

Wednesday, December 16, 2020

Fwd: [DMRN-LIST] Ten PhD/postdoc positions at University of Oslo



Dear all,

We are happy to announce several doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships at RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time, and Motion at the University of Oslo:

There is also one more doctoral fellowship at the Department of Musicology that may be of relevance to this list:

The positions have slightly different application deadlines (from 31 January to 15 March), so check specification for each position.

Please forward to relevant candidates and do not hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions.

Apologies for cross-posting.

Best,
--   Alexander Refsum Jensenius  Professor, Department of Musicology, University of Oslo  https://people.uio.no/alexanje    Deputy Director, RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time, and Motion  https://www.uio.no/ritmo/english/    Director, fourMs Lab  https://fourms.uio.no    Chair, NIME Steering Committee  https://www.nime.org    New master's programme: "Music, Communication & Technology"  http://www.uio.no/mct-master

Tuesday, December 8, 2020

Fwd: [DMRN-LIST] CfP: Special session on representation learning for audio, music, and speech processing



Dear colleagues, 

We are happy to share the call for papers to the special session 

"Representation Learning for Audio, Speech, and Music Processing" 

at the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN) 2021. 

All submitted papers to the special session are submitted at the conference submission portal (as regular papers) and undergo the same full-paper peer review process as any other paper in IJCNN 2021.

Special session website: https://dr-costas.github.io/rlasmp2021-website/  
Conference website: https://www.ijcnn.org  

Accepted special sessions at IJCNN: https://www.ijcnn.org/accepted-special-sessions  


=====================================

Important dates: 

Paper submission: 15th of January, 2021
Notification of acceptance: 15th of March, 2021
Camera ready submission: 30th of March, 2021

=====================================

Scope and topics: 

In the last decade, deep learning has revolutionized the research fields of audio and speech signal processing, acoustic scene analysis, and music information retrieval. In these research fields, methods relying on deep learning have achieved remarkable performance in various applications and tasks, surpassing legacy methods that rely on the independent usage of signal processing operations and machine learning algorithms. The huge success of deep learning methods relies on their ability to learn representations from sound signals that are useful for various downstream tasks. These representations encapsulate the underlying structure or features of the sound signals, or the latent variables that describe the underlying statistics of the respective signals.

Despite this success, learning representations of audio with deep models remains challenging. For example, the diversity of acoustic noise, the multiplicity of recording devices (e.g., high-end microphones vs. smartphones), and the source variability challenge machine learning methods when they are used in realistic environments. In audio event detection, which has recently become a vigorous research field, systems for the automatic detection of multiple overlapping events are still far from reaching human performance. Another major challenge is the design of robust speech processing systems. Speech enhancement technologies have significantly improved in the past years, notably thanks to deep learning methods. However, there is still a large performance gap between controlled environments and real-world situations. As a final example, in the music information retrieval field, modeling the high-level semantics based on local and long-term relations in music signals is still a core challenge. More generally, self-supervised approaches that can leverage a large amount of unlabeled data are very promising for learning models that can serve as a powerful base for many applications and tasks. Thus, it is of great interest for the scientific community to find new methods for representing audio signals using hierarchical models, such as deep neural networks. This will enable novel learning methods to leverage the large amount of information that audio, speech, and music signals convey.

The aim of this session is to establish a venue where engineers, scientists, and practitioners from both academia and industry, can present and discuss cutting-edge results in representation learning in audio, speech, and music signal processing. Driven by the constantly increasing popularity of audio, speech, and music representation learning, the organizing committee of this session is motivated to build, in the long-term, a solid reference within the computational intelligence community for the digital audio field.

The scope of this proposed special session is representation learning, focused on audio, speech, and music. Representation learning is one of the main aspects of neural networks. Thus, the scope of this proposes special session is well aligned with the scope of the IJCNN, as the current special session is focused on a core aspect of neural networks, which is the representation learning.

The topics of the proposed special session include, but are not limited to:

• Audio, speech, and music signal generative models and methods
• Single and multi-channel methods for separation, enhancement, and denoising
• Spatial analysis, modification, and synthesis for augmented and virtual reality
• Detection, localization, and tracking of audio sources/events
• Style transfer, voice conversion, digital effects, and personalization
• Adversarial attacks and real/synthetic discrimination methods
• Information retrieval and classification methods
• Multi- and inter-modal models and methods
• Self-supervised/metric learning methods
• Domain adaptation, transfer learning, knowledge distilation, and K-shot approaches 
• Differentiable signal processing based methods
• Privacy preserving methods
• Interpretability and explainability in deep models for audio
• Context and structure-aware approaches

On behalf of the organizing committee, 

Konstantinos Drossos, PhD
Senior researcher
Audio Research Group
Tampere University, Finland

Office: TF309
Address: Korkeakoulunkatu 10, FI-33720 
mail: konstantinos.drossos@tuni.fi

Monday, December 7, 2020

Fwd: PhD studentships in Artificial Intelligence and Music (AIM) at Queen Mary University of London



UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Artificial Intelligence and Music (AIM), Queen Mary University of London

12+ fully-funded PhD studentships to start September 2021
Covers fees and a stipend for four years
Application deadline: 27 January 2021

Why apply to the AIM Programme?
  • 4-year fully-funded PhD studentships available
  • Extensive choice of projects, drawing on a supervisory team of over 30 academics
  • Access to cutting-edge facilities and expertise in artificial intelligence (AI) and music/audio technology
  • Comprehensive technical training at the intersection of AI and music through a personalized programme
  • Partnerships with over 25 companies and cultural institutions in the music, audio and creative sectors
More information on the AIM Programme can be found at: https://www.aim.qmul.ac.uk/

Programme structure
Our Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) offers a four year training programme where students will carry out a research project in the intersection of AI and music, supported by taught specialist modules, industrial placements, and skills training. Find out more about the programme structure at: http://www.aim.qmul.ac.uk/about/ 

Who can apply?
We are on the lookout for outstanding students interested in the intersection of music/audio technology and AI. Successful applicants will have the following profile:
  • Hold or be completing a Masters degree at distinction or first class level, or equivalent, in Computer Science, Electronic Engineering, Music/Audio Technology, Physics, Mathematics, Music or Psychology. In exceptional circumstances we accept applicants with a first class Bachelors degree who do not hold a Masters degree, provided that applicants can provide evidence of equivalent research experience, industry experience, or specialist training.
  • Programming skills are strongly desirable; however we do not consider this to be an essential criterion if candidates have complementary strengths.
  • Musical training (any of performance, production, composition or theory) is desirable but not a prerequisite.
For this call for applications we are accepting offers from UK Home students and International students, as well as students supported by national and international funding bodies, such as the China Scholarship Council (CSC), CONACYT, and the Commonwealth PhD Scholarship scheme. Queen Mary's commitment to our diverse and inclusive community is embedded in our student admissions processes. We particularly welcome applications from women and under-represented groups, and from applicants in all stages of life.

Funding
For this call we offer 12+ fully-funded 4-year PhD studentships available for students starting in September 2021 which will cover the cost of tuition fees and will provide an annual tax-free stipend (£17,285 in 2020/21). The CDT will also provide funding for conference travel, equipment, and for attending other CDT-related events.

The AIM programme also welcomes applications from students who have sponsorship for PhD study from numerous international funding agencies and also accepts self-funded students. For more information on external PhD studentships and self-funded please visit http://www.aim.qmul.ac.uk/apply .

Apply Now
Information on applications and PhD topics can be found at: http://www.aim.qmul.ac.uk/apply
Application deadline: 27 January 2021
For further information on eligibility, funding and the application process please visit our website. Please email any questions to aim-enquiries@qmul.ac.uk 


— 
Dr. George Fazekas, 
Senior Lecturer (Assoc. Prof.) in Digital Media 
Programme Coordinator, Sound and Music Computing (SMC)
Centre for Digital Music (C4DM)
School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science
Queen Mary University of London, UK
FHEA, M. IEEE, ACM, AES

Wednesday, December 2, 2020

Postdoc position at Sheffield

Postdoc position at Sheffield 

We are pleased to invite applications for a 4-year postdoc position at The University of Sheffield, as part of the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship of Dr Jennifer MacRitchie.  The postdoctoral researcher will work with Jenni in the development of music technology to assist music making and listening in older adults, including people with dementia and complex needs. Candidates should have a PhD in Cognitive Sciences, Engineering, or Psychology and experience in music interface design and/or working with populations with varying physical / cognitive abilities. 

 

Further information and a link to the application portal can be found on the MMM website: 

https://mmm.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/postdoc-music-technology-for-wellbeing

 

Deadline for applications: 15 December 2020

Start date: 1 Feb 2021

Interview date: 12 January 2021 

 

Further questions can be directed to Jenni MacRitchie or to Renee Timmers

Tuesday, December 1, 2020

Fwd: Call for participants: Music, Mind-Wandering, & Wellbeing during COVID-19

Dear all,

Help us to understand whether and how the unusual circumstances
brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic have had an impact on the way
our minds wander, our uses of music in daily life, and our mental
wellbeing.

The study takes approximately 20 minutes to complete, is completely
anonymous, and offers the opportunity to win one £20 Amazon voucher.
The questionnaire can be completed in one of three languages (English,
Greek or Italian). The only requirement to participate is to be an
adult living either in the UK, Greece, or Italy.

To complete the questionnaire, please click on this link:
https://durhammusic.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3K3qytcfDDHZZjL

The study is a collaboration between Durham University (Dr Liila
Taruffi) and the University of Sheffield (Dr Georgina Floridou) and
has received ethical approval from the Music Department (Durham
University). Your participation is voluntary and you are free to
withdraw at any time, and your information will remain anonymous and
confidential. For questions and/or comments, please get in touch:
liila.taruffi@durham.ac.uk or g.floridou@sheffield.ac.uk.

Feel free to pass this message on to anyone who may be interested.

Many thanks in advance for your contribution.

Best wishes,
Dr Georgina Floridou
Honorary Research Fellow
Music & Wellbeing Research Unit
Department of Music, University of Sheffield
34 Leavygreave Road, S3 7RD, Sheffield, UK

Monday, November 23, 2020

Fwd: Lectureship in Music & Science



Details of a Lectureship in Music and Science currently being advertised by the University of Cambridge can be found at:  https://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/27375/

Informal enquiries are welcomed and should be directed to Professor Katharine Ellis (chair@mus.cam.ac.uk). If you have queries regarding the application process please contact Ruth Farley, HR Coordinator (musichr@admin.cam.ac.uk).


Friday, November 20, 2020

Fwd: [DMRN-LIST] PhD scholarships



The University of West London is inviting proposals for PhDs through the Vice Chancellor's scholarship awards. The scholarship includes a fee waiver at the Home/EU rate and a tax-free stipend of £15,000 per annum for three years. 

London College of Music has supervision expertise in a broad range of music and musical-theatre subject areas with particular strengths in Record Production, Audio for Virtual Reality, 21st Century Music Practices (particularly Practice-As-Research) and electronic music composition.

These PhD scholarships are open to all UK/EU students who qualify - details at: https://www.uwl.ac.uk/research/graduate-centre/vice-chancellors-phd-scholarships 

The deadline for applications is 30th November 2020