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
Aren 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 PublicLauren (Sculthorpe) Petle (Starkey) - Auditory system learns rules without awareness
Date:Fri, 05/19/2017 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarLauren (Sculthorpe) Petle from Starkey Research in Berkeley will be here to talk about how the auditory system learns rules without awareness.
There are lots of processes involved in understanding the auditory world around us. Certainly one of the most important is learning the relationship between sounds. Some of this learning is certainly driven by attention and a desire to learn and understand about auditory signals. But are there also components of learning about the auditory world that work at an unconscious level? I’m guessing there are, but how does one separate out the conscious from the unconscious processes of learning about our auditory world? Can we design experiments that show a difference?FREEOpen to the PublicLee Miller (UCDavis) - Hearing Loss and Neurotechnology: New Approaches to Improve Speech Perception
Date:Fri, 05/12/2017 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarWithout a doubt, the holy grail of hearing research is helping people (and machines) navigate our noisy world. We still don’t have a good model of how we separate the sounds around us, so we can attend to the signal with the highest value. And it’s even harder to build tools that help us diagnose problems and to help people who have hearing disabilities.
FREEOpen to the PublicAuriel Washburn (CCRMA) - Coordinated Timing in Piano Duet Performance: Examining the Effects of Delayed Auditory Feedback
Date:Fri, 05/05/2017 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarCCRMA’s own Aury Washburn will be leading the discussion this week at the Stanford Hearing Seminar on her work to connect hearing to performance.
Many years ago there was a neurophysiology meeting where most of the talks were about cortex. There was a lone keynote speech by a researcher interested in controlling muscle. He pointed out that without his work (i.e. muscle movement) then all the cortical work in the world was meaningless. :-) That is sobering. We perceive in order to act.FREEOpen to the PublicParis Smaragdis on striving for computational and physical efficiency in audio processing
Date:Fri, 04/21/2017 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarOne of the best talks at the recent HSCMA2017 workshop was a keynote by Prof. Paris Smaragdis from Univ of Illinois and also Adobe. Paris will be at CCRMA this coming Friday to talk about algorithms for processing that are algorithmically and physically efficient. Think about speech and audio processing algorithms that you might want to run continuously on a cell phone (with an all-too-small battery.) How do you design algorithms that process speech and audio, and do it in a way that is mindful of real-world constraints. It was a good and fun talk.
Paris has done many interesting and creative kinds of audio processing. And now he is thinking about what algorithms make sense in the real world, where time and energy matter.FREEOpen to the PublicRamani Duriaswami on Creating Scientifically Valid Spatial Audio for VR and AR (Special Thursday Seminar)
Date:Thu, 03/23/2017 - 4:00pm - 5:30pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarThe exploding popularity of augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR) have driven new interest in getting 3d sound right. This means rendering an accurate 3d sound field that fully immerses *anybody* that uses the system. Perhaps 3D audio is ready for the big time now.
FREEOpen to the PublicEric Young - Timing in the Auditory System
Date:Fri, 03/10/2017 - 10:30am - 12:00pmLocation:CCRMA Seminar RoomEvent Type:Hearing SeminarHow does the auditory system preserve the high accuracy needed to represent temporal signals such as speech and music? (Well, really all sound.) Think about the precision needed to encode the onsets of sound, let alone the cues needed to perceive pitch and binaural. This precision is orders of magnitude more precise than any where else in the brain. And yet the brain does it one spike at a time. OK, there are lots of spikes. How does the brain represent time, and how does an ensemble of spikes tell us what we need to know about the sounds around us? What is the mechanism that allows this exquisite precision?
FREEOpen to the Public
