Hearing Seminars
CCRMA hosts a weekly Hearing seminar (aka Music 319). All areas related to perception are discussed, but the group emphasizes topics that will help us understand how the auditory system works. Speakers are drawn from the group and visitors to the Stanford area. Most attendees are graduate students, faculty, or local researchers interested in psychology, music, engineering, neurophysiology, and linguistics. Stanford students can (optionally) receive credit to attend, by enrolling in Music 319 "Research Seminar on Computational Models of Sound Perception." Meetings are usually from 10:30AM to 12:20 (or so, depending on questions) on Friday mornings in the CCRMA Seminar Room.
The current schedule is announced via a mailing list. To subscribe yourself to the mailing list, please visit https://cm-mail.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/hearing-seminar If you have any questions, please contact Malcolm Slaney at hearing-seminar-admin@ccrma.stanford.edu.
Recent Hearing Seminars
Purnima Kamath on Generative Models for Sound Design
Date:Fri, 09/13/2024 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing Seminar
Large language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT are making striking changes to how we think about words and intelligence. Generative models (https://developers.google.com/machine-learning/gan/generative) take these ideas a step further by creating new data from a text prompt. Can an LLM and a generative model create new kinds of sounds? It is easy to imagine a system that lets you generate dog sounds, for example. But how would you build a system that lets you ask for a dog sound with a touch of wolf? With steerability or morphing the sound landscapes become much more interesting. Can we control a generative model to make both big and small changes to the sound we generate?FREEOpen to the PublicDemo of Personalized 3d Sound System
Date:Fri, 08/16/2024 - 12:00pm - 6:00pmLocation:DoubleTree Hotel, 275 South Airport Blvd, South San Francisco, CaliforniaEvent Type:Hearing SeminarHow do we reproduce personalized 3D sound? Karlheinz Brandenburg (one of the authors of the MP3 standard) argues that a generic HRTF (head-related transfer function) is sufficient as long as you simulate the room reverb. This is a rather bold statement, because the standard answer says that getting the correct HRTF is most important. Do we need to match the room or the pinnae?
FREEOpen to the PublicLeslie Famularo on Differentiating and Optimizing an Auditory Model
Date:Fri, 08/09/2024 - 12:00am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing Seminar
One of the shortcomings of current AI work is the inability to tie the results back to known physics. This is useful both to help explain the results, but also to constrain the optimal solution to known physical properties of the system. Neural networks are hard. They are big, often times the result is inscruttable. What can be done?
New software paradigms such as JAX and PyTorch allow one to specify arbitrary computations in a way that can be differentiated. And if we can differentiate a function we can optimize it. Hurray. How can we express an auditory model in a differentiable fashion?FREEOpen to the PublicRobert L. White's Cochlear Implants - Repeat Seminar
Date:Tue, 07/02/2024 - 4:00pm - 5:30pmEvent Type:Hearing Seminar
Cochlear implants (CI) are amazing. Squirt a little current into a cochlea and you hear a buzzing sound. It is even more amazing that the right currents sound like speech. What was it like to first convey speech to new cochlear implant users?
This is a repeat of the May 31 seminar, for those wishing to join from another time zone. It will be online only and recorded. The recording is avaialble on YouTube at ths URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hoY24bVTZwFREEOpen to the PublicRobert L. White's Cochlear Implants
Date:Fri, 05/31/2024 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:Biomedical Innovations Building, BMI 1021, 240 Pasteur Drive, Stanford, CAEvent Type:Hearing SeminarCochlear implants (CI) are amazing. Squirt a little current into a cochlea and you hear a buzzing sound. It is even more amazing that the right currents sound like speech.
Join us for a special Stanford Hearing Seminar on the invention of the cochlear implant speech processor. May 31st at 10:30AM in Stanford BMI 1021FREEOpen to the PublicSenyuan Fan will Exploring Implicit Neural Audio Representation
Date:Fri, 05/24/2024 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomDetails to follow. Presentation with Marina Bosi.Event Type:Hearing SeminarFREEOpen to the PublicExploring Neural Audio Coding Methods
Date:Fri, 05/24/2024 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarDeep neural networks are good at doing many things, such as classification, predictions, and regression. But perhaps their most impressive accomplishment is to learn an *implicit* representation of a signal. Instead of just predicting a value, a DNN can learn the underlying function f(x) that generates the data. Given a position request (x) it returns the “true” value of the function, even for places it has not seen.
This week at the CCRMA Hearing Seminar Senyuan Fan and Prof. Marina Bosi claim that these implicit methods require less training data and achieve higher compression rates than other approaches. How do they do that?
Who: Senyuan Fan and Marina Bosi
What: Exploring Neural Audio Coding MethodsFREEOpen to the PublicLloyd May on Audio Processing Strategies to Enhance Cochlear Implant Users' Music Enjoyment
Date:Fri, 05/10/2024 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarCochlear implants are an amazing solution to a hard problem. How do you electrically stimulate the auditory system to convey sound to people who are otherwise deaf? This is an example of a brain-computer interface and millions have been fitted to people who have difficulty hearing. They work well enough to allow people to understand speech. It's really quite remarkable. But what about music? What might we do to encode music so that people with cochlear implants can enjoy it? Why is music different than speech, and what parts of the musical signal might be conveyed?
Who: Lloyd May (CCRMA)
What: Designing Audio Processing Strategies to Enhance Cochlear Implant Users' Music Enjoyment
When: Fri, 05/10/2024 - 10:30am - 12:00pm
Where: CCRMA Seminar Room, Top Floor of The Knoll at Stanford
Why: How do we stimulate our brains with electricity.
FREEOpen to the PublicChristine Evers on Embodied Audio
Date:Tue, 04/09/2024 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarTeaching robots to hear is important and hard. This is true whether you are talking about an arm, a walking robot, or a car. Robots move, generating their own sounds. We wish for our machines to have a full 360 degrees of situational awareness. They are often in close proximity to humans, so the stakes are higher. And we never have enough microphones or a big enough baseline.
At next **Tuesday’s** Hearing Seminar, Prof. Christine Evers from Southhampton will be talking about embodied audio, or how to teach (noisy) robots how to hear. The last time I saw Dr. Evers, she won a best presentation award, and I’m looking forward to hearing her perspective on how to help our machine (overloads :-) hear better.FREEOpen to the PublicA Bayesian model of auditory performance
Date:Fri, 03/15/2024 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Stage (New location this week)Event Type:Hearing SeminarThe auditory system is large and complex. Most auditory models are decidedly deterministic, except for a spiking model. We'll never have enough tests to fully characterize it. Can Bayesian modeling help, summarizing what we know, and providing probability distributions for the parts we do not know?
FreeOpen to the Public
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