22 Nov 2013

Jean-Julien Aucouturier, from CNRS/IRCAM, gives a seminar on "Spectro-temporal receptive fields (STRFs): a biologically-plausible alternative to MFCCs?" on Friday November 22nd at 15:30h in room 55.410.

Abstract: We describe some recent experiments to adapt a recent computational model of the mammalian auditory cortex to the tasks of Music Information Retrieval. The model, called Spectro-temporal Receptive Fields (STRFs), simulates the responses of auditory cortical neurons as a filterbank of Gabor function tuned on frequencies, but also rates (temporal modulations in Hz) and scales (frequency modulations in cycle/octave). Off the shelf, it provides a 30,000 dimensional feature space; when these dimensions are integrated, we can derive novel signal representations/features that  (1) perform equivalently or better than e.g. Mel-Frequency Cepstrum Coefficients for a task of audio similarity, (2) are somewhat amusing (e.g. dynamic frequency wrapping instead of DTW), and (3) more plausible that the usual MIR features from a biological point of view. 

Jean-Julien Aucouturier's website