Sound Mixtures: A musician’s delight, an engineer’s nightmare!

Abstract:
Musicians have long embraced polyphony all the way back to the middle ages.  Engineers, even today, are still struggling to come to terms with it.  Traditional audio signal processing has primarily focused on monophonic signals, such as isolated speech, or solo instruments.  But, with the increasing popularity of automated music analysis we are now facing a new level of complexity to signal processing, prompting for some radical rethinking of the fundamentals.  In this talk I’ll present some of my work along these lines, and present some solutions to classic problems such as music transcription and source separation, but also explore some of the new things which are possible once we can deal with sound mixtures.

Paris Smaragdis is a senior research scientist at Adobe Systems and holds degrees from MIT under the supervision of Barry Vercoe in the Machine Listening Group.  Primary research interests revolve around making machines that can listen and includes numerous publications on source separation, Music Information Retrieval (MIR), and is associated with renowned research labs such as MERL, Interval Research, and Starlab.  Dr. Smaragdis is currently a visiting scientist at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brian Research, ad in 2006 was named one of the “top technology innovators” by MIT’s Technology Review.