On Thursday March 24th 2011 at 15:30h in room 52.321, Meinard Müller, from the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, gives a talk on "New Developments in Music Signal Processing".

Abstract: Compared to speech signal processing, the field of music signal processing is a relatively young research discipline. Therefore, many techniques and representations have been transferred from the speech domain to the music domain. However, music signals possess specific acoustic and structural characteristics that are not shared by spoken language or audio signals from other domains. To account for musical dimensions such as pitch or rhythm, specialized audio features that exploit musical characteristics are indispensable in analyzing and processing music data. In fact, many tasks of music signal analysis only become feasible by exploiting suitable music-specific assumptions. In this talk, I address a number of feature design principles that account for various musical aspects. In particular, I show how chroma-based audio features can be enhanced by significantly boosting the degree of timbre invariance without degrading the features' discriminative power. Furthermore, I introduce a novel mid-level representation that captures dominant tempo and pulse information in music recordings. To highlight the practical and musical relevance, I discuss the various feature representations in the context of current music information retrieval tasks including music synchronization, beat tracking, and structure analysis. By giving many audio examples and presenting various prototypical user interfaces, this presentation is directed to a general audience.

Meinard Müller's website