I am tormented by this delicious-sounding audio-related conference which will be taking place at heavenly Barbican, and a little bit at QMUL, and will undoubtedly be full of sound nerds, but I am doing other stuff at work so can’t go along and play. And to be honest I’d probably not really understand much of it anyway. I’m not exactly sure what semantic audio is to be honest*.
Delegates might want to look out for a copy of Audio! which is a magazine that my boss Prof Paul Curzon writes for schoolkids, all about how computing can be used in the world of music and sound (lots, there are four issues!). They might be in the delegate packs at the tutorial day at QMUL (I offered to stand and hold them but we’re not short of tables it seems). The magazine looks like this and you can download PDFs of issues 1-4 from the hyperlinked image:
*OK I’ve just read the explanatory blurb and it seems to be a mashup between librarianship and sound… drool.
I’ve also spotted that the organising committee’s chair’s name is Karlheinz Brandenburg. Difficult to avoid interesting sound-related things with a wonderful name like that 🙂
*** Audio Engineering Society 53rd conference on Semantic Audio ***
London, UK, January 26-29, 2014.
Tutorial day: January 26, 2014.
Semantic Audio is concerned with content-based management of digital audio recordings. The rapid evolution of digital audio technologies, e.g. audio data compression and streaming, the availability of large audio libraries online and offline, and recent developments in content-based audio retrieval have significantly changed the way digital audio is created, processed, and consumed. New audio content can be produced at lower cost, while also large audio archives at libraries or record labels are opening to the public. Thus the sheer amount of available audio data grows more and more each day. Semantic analysis of audio resulting in high-level metadata descriptors such as musical chords and tempo, or the identification of speakers facilitate content-based management of audio recordings. Aside from audio retrieval and recommendation technologies, the semantics of audio signals are also becoming increasingly important, for instance, in object-based audio coding, as well as intelligent audio editing, and processing. Recent product releases already demonstrate this to a great extent, however, more innovative functionalities relying on semantic audio analysis and management are imminent. These functionalities may utilise, for instance, (informed) audio source separation, speaker segmentation and identification, structural music segmentation, or social and Semantic Web technologies, including ontologies and linked open data.
This conference will give a broad overview of the state of the art and address many of the new scientific disciplines involved in this still-emerging field. Our purpose is to continue fostering this line of interdisciplinary research. This is reflected by the wide variety of invited speakers presenting at the conference.
Keynote and invited speakers
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The programme highlights 3 keynote and 4 invited talks from world leading researchers in the field of Semantic Audio as well as from industry. Please see the abstracts of the talks and a short bio of the speakers using the links below.
Conference Programme
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The three (+1) day conference programme includes
oral and poster sessions to be held at the
Barbican Centre in a convenient central London location,
social events, and a
technical tour at the BBC in London (participant numbers will be limited and subject to registration on a first come first served basis).
A
tutorial day on January 26, 2014 will be held at
Queen Mary University of London on effective research practices (e.g. the use of version control and unit testing in audio research) and Intelligent audio production. The tutorials are sponsored by
Soundsoftware.ac.uk and will be free to attend for all conference participants.
Sponsors and Partners:
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The conference is sponsored by:
CoSound Danish Research Project (Basic sponsor)
Paper co-chairs
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George Fazekas, Queen Mary University of London
Christian Dittmar, Fraunhofer IDMT
Sebastian Ewert, Queen Mary University of London
Organising Committee
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Karlheinz Brandenburg (chair), Fraunhofer IDMT
Mark Sandler (chair), QMUL
Chris Baume, BBC R&D
Christian Dittmar, Fraunhofer IDMT
Sebastian Ewert, QMUL
Dawn Black, QMUL
Mathieu Barthet, QMUL
Andrew Robertson, QMUL
Yading Song, QMUL
Mi Tian, QMUL
Michael Terrell, QMUL
Panos Kudumakis, QMUL
Sue White, QMUL
Brecht De Man, QMUL
Thomas Wilmering, QMUL
Carl Joseph Bussey, QMUL
Katerina Kosta, QMUL
Jordan Smith, QMUL
James Vegunty, QMUL
David Ronan, QMUL