Category Research

AIM PhD student Shubhr Singh, among other C4DM members, is participating in the organisation of the task on Few-shot Bioacoustic Event Detection as part of the IEEE AASP Challenge on Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE 2024).

This task addresses a real need from animal researchers by providing a well-defined, constrained yet highly variable domain to evaluate machine learning methodology. It aims to advance the study of audio signal processing and deep learning in the low-resource scenario, particularly in domain adaptation and few-shot learning. Datasets will be released on 1st June 2024, with the challenge deadline being on 15 June 2024.

Can you build a system that detects an animal sound with only 5 examples? Let’s liaise to push the boundary of computational bioacoustics and machine listening!

AIM PhD candidate Yinghao Ma presented his work entitled “MusiLingo: Bridging Music and Text with Pre-trained Language Models for Music Captioning and Query Response” at a recent workshop hosted by the British Machine Vision Association and the Society for Pattern Recognition in London, on April 24, 2024. MusiLingo is a system merging pre-trained music encoders with language models to enhance music-text interaction. It aims to make music more interpretable for everyone, ranging from composers to those that are hard of hearing, using a projection layer that integrates music embeddings into language models for effective text generation. More information about the workshop can be found here, and more information on MusiLingo is available on the paper and Hugging Face.

The Centre for Digital Music will be hosting the second in-person meet-up of the UK Acoustics Network special interest group on Spatial Acoustics and Immersive Audio (SIG-SAIA) on the 10th of May, 2024, at Queen Mary University of London. The meetup will be organised by Dr Aidan Hogg, Lecturer in Computer Science at C4DM and Queen Mary, who is also SIG-SAIA group co-ordinator.

The meetup will feature short talks from researchers working in the group’s remit, including AIM PhD student Chin-Yun Yu who will give a talk on “Time-of-arrival estimation and phase unwrapping of head-related transfer functions with integer linear programming”, and C4DM Post-Doctoral Research Assistant and former AIM PhD student Saurjya Sarkar who will give a talk on “Time-domain music source separation for choirs and ensembles”. The meetup will conclude with a backstage visit at the Royal Opera House.

More information on the meetup and information on how to attend can be found at: https://acoustics.ac.uk/second-in-person-sig-saia-meet-up/