DMRN 2021

The AIM 2020 cohort will be organising the Digital Music Research Network (DMRN) 2021 workshop on 21st December 2021. The workshop is hosted at QMUL on an annual basis by the Centre for Digital Music and aims to promote research in Digital Music by bringing together researchers from academia and industry in electronics engineering, computer science, and music.

The workshop will include 2 keynote talks by Dr. Sophie Scott and  Dr. Gus Xia  along with a neural synthesis hackathon and poster presentations. For more details, please refer to the relevant website.


NASH: the Neural Audio Synthesis Hackathon + workshop

As a satellite event to DMRN+16, AIM researchers have organised a hackathon around the theme of neural audio synthesis, a growing field which focuses on producing audio with neural networks.

The hackathon is organised by SIGNAS (the Special Interest Group on Neural Audio Synthesis), a group formed in response to the growing contingent of researchers at C4DM interested in topics at the intersection of sound perception, synthesis, and deep learning.

The neural audio synthesis hackathon (NASH) will take place on 18th-19th December, with the winning hacks to be presented at a talk at DMRN+16 on the 21st December. At the time of writing nearly 50 participants have registered, and this number continues to grow as the event approaches. The event aims to encourage cross-disciplinary collaboration in neural audio synthesis by encouraging the development of new techniques, tools, and interfaces, with a particular focus on creative musical applications. Projects are particularly encouraged under the following topics:

  • Interfaces and instruments
  • Novel techniques and models
  • Synthesis control
  • Creative applications

More information and registration details can be found on the hackathon website.

In advance of the hackathon, SIGNAS have also organised a neural audio synthesis workshop on 12th December at 4pm UTC, which will feature tutorials from 5 exciting researchers and artists working with deep learning and audio synthesis, including AIM’s own Ilaria Manco. The event is free and will be hosted online, with tickets and details about talks available at this link.


AIM students and staff to join the Alan Turing Institute

The Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute in artificial intelligence and data science, is a project partner of the AIM CDT and three AIM PhD students and six AIM supervisors will join the Turing in Autumn 2021.

The following AIM PhD students will join the Turing as Enrichment students in 2021/22:

  • Lele Liu – Enrichment project: Cross-domain automatic music audio-to-score transcription
  • Ilaria Manco – Enrichment project: Multimodal deep learning for music information retrieval
  • Luca Marinelli – Enrichment project: Gender-coded sound: A multimodal data-driven analysis of gender encoding strategies in sound and music for advertising

The Turing’s Enrichment scheme offers students enrolled on a doctoral programme at a UK university an opportunity to boost their research project with a placement at the Turing for up to 12 months.

The following AIM supervisors have been appointed Turing Fellows in 2021/22:

Turing Fellows are scholars with proven research excellence in data science, artificial intelligence or a related field whose research would be significantly enhanced through active involvement with the Turing network of universities and partners.