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AIM student Andrea Martelloni won third prize at the 25th Guthman Musical Instrument Competition held at Georgia Tech, Atlanta on 11th March 2023!

Andrea presented the HITar, an augmented guitar supporting percussive playing with the help of a DNN gesture classifier and physical modelling synthesis provided by PRISM Labs’s MetaSynth. The project was supervised by Dr Mathieu Barthet and Prof Andrew McPherson. The HiTAR is an augmented instrument that uses an acoustic guitar as its base and has embedded sensors to capture a performer’s gestures and hits. The body of the guitar and the captured gestures of the player are connected using machine learning, and the sound from striking the body is transformed to resemble sounds on different surfaces like metal or glass. This allows the performer to organically explore additional gestures and sounds to accompany the traditional guitar performance.

Also present at the competition finals was C4DM’s Lia Mice with her Chaos Bells, a large instrument she designed with Andrew McPherson during her Media and Arts Technology PhD.

The Guthman Musical Instrument Competition was initially designed to identify the next generation of musical instrumentalists, It has turned into one of the only competitions and events dedicated to identifying next-generation musical instruments and the best new ideas in musicality, design, and engineering. It is hosted by the School of Music at Georgia Tech, Atlanta-USA. This year’s Guthman Musical Instrument Competition featured nine finalists from six countries and the result is an event that exposes new technologies and novel ideas to a community of musicians who are natural experimenters.

You can see the video presentation of the HITar here, and you can watch the public performance of all the contestants on Georgia Tech’s YouTube channel.

The AIM 2021 cohort will be organising the Digital Music Research Network (DMRN) 2022 workshop on 20th December 2022. The workshop is hosted at QMUL on an annual basis by the Centre for Digital Music and aims to promote research in Digital Music by bringing together researchers from academia and industry in electronics engineering, computer science, and music.

The workshop will include a keynote talk by Dr. Sander Dieleman on generative modelling and iterative refinement. Submission of abstracts for talks or posters are open until 20th November.

If you are a possible AIM CDT 2023 applicant, you are welcome to come and talk to us on the event (contact us for registration). For more details, please refer to the relevant website .

On 3-4 November, AIM PhD student Shubhr Singh will participate at the 7th Workshop on Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE 2022). The workshop aims to provide a venue for researchers working on computational analysis of sound events and scene analysis to present and discuss their results, and is organised in conjunction with the DCASE 2022 Challenge. He was involved in the organisation of the DCASE 2021 & 2022 Challenge task on Few-shot Bioacoustic Event Detection and was responsible for designing the deep learning baseline of the task along with task webpage management. The task will be presented in challenge highlight and general track spotlight session on Thursday, 3rd November, 2022 at 9:10 & 9:40 AM respectively. For more details on the task, kindly refer to the following paper:

• Few-shot bioacoustic event detection at the DCASE 2022 challenge, by Ines Nolasco, Dan Stowell, Vincent Lostanlen, Shubhr Singh, Veronica Morfi, Ari Strandburg-Peshkin, Lisa Gill, Emily Grout, Ester Vidana-Villa, Joe Morford, Michael Emmerson, Frants Jensen, Helen Whitehead, Hanna Pamula, Ivan Kiskin

See you all at DCASE!