Guest Speaker
Teaching Machines to Listen
Bryan Pardo
Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
Northwestern University
Apr 29 2008 3:30PM
480 Dreese Labs
All interested parties are invited to attend.
Refreshments will be served prior to the talk.
Abstract:
Music collections comprise one of the most popular categories of online multimedia content, as evidenced by the millions of recordings available in online repositories such as Emusic, Yahoo! Music, Rhapsody and Apple's iTunes. These vast online collections let the average person access and hear more music than was possible for even music scholars only a few years ago. Of course, finding a music document is only the beginning--a step to initiate the task at hand. Bryan Pardo and his students in the Northwestern University Interactive Audio Lab develop key technologies that let composers, researchers, performers and casual listeners retrieve, study, edit and interact with music in new ways. This talk will provide an overview of recent work in the lab. Projects include: a music search engine that finds a song from a melody sung to the computer (audio database search); a cell phone based karaoke game (social computing), automated music video creation (digital culture); a system that learns to recognize sounds from an audio mixture and uses its learned knowledge to label new recordings (machine learning and source identification); and a system to align a musical score to an expressive performance that could be used in automated karaoke (score alignment).
Bio:
Bryan Pardo is an assistant professor in the Northwestern University Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, with appointments in Northwestern’s Music Cognition program and the Center for Technology and Social Behavior. Prof. Pardo received a M. Mus. in Jazz and Improvisation and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan. He has been featured on a number of albums and taught as an adjunct professor in the Music Department of Madonna University. He has developed speech software for the Speech and Hearing department of the Ohio State University, statistical software for SPSS and worked as a researcher for General Dynamics. When he's not programming, writing or teaching, he performs throughout the Midwest on saxophone and clarinet at venues such as Albion College, the Chicago Cultural Center and the Detroit Concert of Colors.
Host: Deliang Wang
