Collaboration between FAST and Audiolabs Erlangen

By Sebastian Ewert (Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London)

AudioLabsFAST project member Sebastian Ewert (Queen Mary University of London) visited in July our project partner International Audio Laboratories Erlangen, a joint institution of the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuernberg (FAU) and Fraunhofer Institut fuer Integrierte Schaltungen IIS. In a week-long meeting the partners exchanged their knowledge and experience regarding various aspects of Neural Networks, a technology currently dominating recent developments in signal processing and machine learning with applications ranging from automatically colouring gray scale images (*1), repainting photos in the style of famous artists (*2), to translation between languages and automatically steering cars and robots in the real world (*4). The discussion with Prof. Meinard Mueller and his doctoral students from the Semantic Audio Signal Processing group focused around the development of several new concepts to use or develop new variants of neural networks capable of extracting different types of semantical information from music recordings.

(*1) http://tinyclouds.org/colorize/
(*2) https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.06576
(*3) https://www.engadget.com/2016/03/11/google-is-using-neural-networks-to-improve-translate/
(*4) http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/embedded-systems/bringing-big-neural-networks-to-selfdriving-cars-smartphones-and-drones