NASH: the Neural Audio Synthesis Hackathon + workshop

As a satellite event to DMRN+16, AIM researchers have organised a hackathon around the theme of neural audio synthesis, a growing field which focuses on producing audio with neural networks.

The hackathon is organised by SIGNAS (the Special Interest Group on Neural Audio Synthesis), a group formed in response to the growing contingent of researchers at C4DM interested in topics at the intersection of sound perception, synthesis, and deep learning.

The neural audio synthesis hackathon (NASH) will take place on 18th-19th December, with the winning hacks to be presented at a talk at DMRN+16 on the 21st December. At the time of writing nearly 50 participants have registered, and this number continues to grow as the event approaches. The event aims to encourage cross-disciplinary collaboration in neural audio synthesis by encouraging the development of new techniques, tools, and interfaces, with a particular focus on creative musical applications. Projects are particularly encouraged under the following topics:

  • Interfaces and instruments
  • Novel techniques and models
  • Synthesis control
  • Creative applications

More information and registration details can be found on the hackathon website.

In advance of the hackathon, SIGNAS have also organised a neural audio synthesis workshop on 12th December at 4pm UTC, which will feature tutorials from 5 exciting researchers and artists working with deep learning and audio synthesis, including AIM’s own Ilaria Manco. The event is free and will be hosted online, with tickets and details about talks available at this link.


AIM students and staff to join the Alan Turing Institute

The Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute in artificial intelligence and data science, is a project partner of the AIM CDT and three AIM PhD students and six AIM supervisors will join the Turing in Autumn 2021.

The following AIM PhD students will join the Turing as Enrichment students in 2021/22:

  • Lele Liu – Enrichment project: Cross-domain automatic music audio-to-score transcription
  • Ilaria Manco – Enrichment project: Multimodal deep learning for music information retrieval
  • Luca Marinelli – Enrichment project: Gender-coded sound: A multimodal data-driven analysis of gender encoding strategies in sound and music for advertising

The Turing’s Enrichment scheme offers students enrolled on a doctoral programme at a UK university an opportunity to boost their research project with a placement at the Turing for up to 12 months.

The following AIM supervisors have been appointed Turing Fellows in 2021/22:

Turing Fellows are scholars with proven research excellence in data science, artificial intelligence or a related field whose research would be significantly enhanced through active involvement with the Turing network of universities and partners.


AIM at IJCNN 2021

On 18-22 July 2021, AIM researchers will participate virtually at the IEEE International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN 2021), the flagship conference of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society and the International Neural Network Society.

The AIM CDT will have a strong presence at the conference, with the following papers authored/co-authored by AIM members to be presented at IJCNN 2021:

  • MusCaps: Generating Captions for Music Audio
    Ilaria Manco, Emmanouil Benetos, Elio Quinton and Gyorgy Fazekas
    Paper
  • A Modulation Front-End for Music Audio Tagging
    Cyrus Vahidi, Charalampos Saitis and Gyorgy Fazekas
    Paper
  • Revisiting the Onsets and Frames Model with Additive Attention
    Kin Wai Cheuk, Yin-Jyun Luo, Emmanouil Benetos and Dorien Herremans
    Paper

Original news post here.