Hearing Seminars
CCRMA hosts a weekly Hearing seminar. 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. 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 be added to the mailing list, send email to hearing-seminar-request@ccrma.stanford.edu. If you have any questions, please contact Malcolm Slaney at hearing-seminar-admin@ccrma.stanford.edu.
Recent Hearing Seminars
Decoding EEG Signals by Malcolm Slaney
Date:Fri, 02/02/2018 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarThere are many ways to interpret EEG signals, but the newest approach eschew averaging and perform single-shot decoding. This allows for real-time information about how a subject is perceiving a sound. How does one connect arbitrary audio to the resulting EEG signals? Or how does one predict the audio that resulted in a particular EEG signal? Can I tell you the sound you are attending to? I'll be talking about recent work using linear and correlation methods to build better models that connect audition and EEG signals. This a form of system identification, and has been shown to work for decoding which of two audio signals one is attending to. Cool stuff.
Who: Malcolm Slaney (Google and CCRMA)
What: EEG Decoding Algorithms and ResultsFREEOpen to the PublicModeling fine time structure in the brain
Date:Fri, 01/19/2018 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarWe really don't know how auditory *information* is represented in the brain. The easiest approach relies on the rate profile, simply a measure of how fast a group of neurons is firing. But the rate profile ignores a lot of information in the exact timing of each spike. And at a higher level there are oscillatory representations. All of these representations can be used to encode information, but which is most important and leads to the best model of auditory perception?
FREEOpen to the PublicAudio Style Transformations using Deep Neural Networks by Prateek Verma
Date:Fri, 01/12/2018 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing Seminar
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been wildly successful for many tasks, but none of the tasks are as wondrous as the success that DNNs have had on transferring the style of one painting to another painter’s art. This magical trick is accomplished by mixing and matching the low-level feature analysis layers between different styles of paining, so a painting in one style is rendered in another with different kinds of brush works.
But can we do this for audio? Prateek Verma has been experimenting with this, and will talk about his work and results. What does audio style mean, and how does one capture it?
Who: Prateek Verma (Stanford CCRMA)
What: Audio Style Transformations using Deep Neural NetworksFREEOpen to the PublicElisabetta Chicca on spike-based learning
Date:Thu, 12/07/2017 - 5:00pm - 5:50pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarSpike...Spike.....Spike..Spike........Spike. That's how the brain communicates. But how do you spikes help you learn? And more importantly, how do you modify a spiking network to learn new things (like speech and music)? The colloquial rule is "those who fire together, wire together" but in practice you need causality. A more realistic learning model is called spike-timing-dependent plasticity, where a particular neural connection is strengthened when an input spike immediately precedes the output spike. An input spike must happen before the output. This is the backprop, for those of you from the machine-learning or DNN world, of the real neural world.
FREEOpen to the PublicWeighing acoustic factors in music and language during development
Date:Fri, 12/01/2017 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarChristina M. Vanden Bosch der Nederlanden will be talking about the differences between speech and music when we develop our auditory brains. They seem pretty different to us now, but how do our young brains parse the cachophony of sounds and decide that some sounds are meant to be recognized as words, and other sounds are just to make us feel good. Or are they both?
Who: Christina M. Vanden Bosch der Nederlanden
What: Weighing acoustic factors in music and language during development
When: 10:30AM on Friday December 1, 2017
Where: CCRMA Seminar Room, top floor of the Knoll at Stanford
Why: How do we learn the meaning (or not) of sounds??Open to the PublicJan Skoglund on Objective Quality Assessment for Immersive Audio
Date:Fri, 11/10/2017 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarWith the surging interest in augmented and virtual reality, there is more and more interest in high-quality 3D sound rendering. We heard many talks about this last year, with very smart people rendering sounds in complicated physical environments. My favorite was one group who said they could model the sounds from a hallway the user couldn't see. But does this matter? I'm not sure I could tell the difference. But I'm mindful of the fact that at one point people thought LP records were the ultimate in audio fidelity.
FREEOpen to the PublicAren Jansen on AudioSet: Real world audio event classification
Date:Fri, 11/03/2017 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarAudioSet is an attempt to do for audio processing what big image databases like ImageNet have done for computer vision. Arguably big image datasets like ImageNet, by Prof. Li Fei-Fei at Stanford, and the competitions they have spawned, have advanced image recognition more than any other research result.
Aren Jansen, from Google, will be talking about AudioSet. He will talk about their data collection effort, how the data is organized and the first results on sound object recognition from this large dataset. By large, they mean 2.1M human-annotated videos, 5.8M hours of audio, and 527 classes of sounds.FREEOpen to the PublicMalcolm Slaney on Cool Audio Projects from the Telluride Neuromorphic Workshop
Date:Fri, 10/27/2017 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarFor many years a collection of world-reknown faculty and amazing students have gathered in the mountains of Telluride to propose and pilot interesting auditory experiments. This past summer was no exception, and Prof. Fujioka and I would like to review the 11 auditory projects that were successful this year. This ranges from music perception, to decoding EEG responses, to matching deep neural networks and brains. We were studying musical scales, tension, and rhythm. What could be more fun?!!?!?
The projects include:
Decoding
Tension decoding ♪
Musical scales ♪
Pitch
Salience detection
Hierarchical features for decodingFREEOpen to the PublicGareth Loy on What does music do that engages and holds our interest?
Date:Fri, 10/20/2017 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarWith all the new interest in computer generated music (e.g. Project Magenta) it is good to revisit the issue of what makes music intereting. Generating truly random "music" is easy, but what does it take to make it interesting? Gareth Loy is a CCRMA alumni, coming back to talk about this topic. With the great combination of perception and computer folks near CCRMA, I expect this will be a vigorous discussion.
Who: Gareth Loy
When: Friday October 20 at 10:30AM
What: What does music do that engages and holds our interest?
Where: CCRMA Seminar Room (come early to get a place at the table)
Why: Because music perception and computers are fun!FREEOpen to the PublicHeather Bortfield (UC Merced) on Perceptual learning in support of language: Insights from infants and cochlear implantees
Date:Fri, 05/26/2017 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarHeather Bortfeld from UC Merced will be here to talk about Perceptual learning in support of language: Insights from infants and cochlear implantees
What does the brain know about sound when you are born deaf? There are well-established devices such as cochlear implants to give people the sensation of sound when their inner ear isn’t working. These devices work best when they are applied early. But what abilities are we born with, and how do we understand what these children are hearing, before they have language, or much of a behavioral system.FREEOpen to the Public
