News

The 25th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2024) has just taken place, and we are pleased to announce that the following works authored by AIM students (highlighted in bold) received best paper awards at the conference:

• MuChoMusic: Evaluating Music Understanding in Multimodal Audio-Language Models (Benno Weck, Ilaria Manco, Emmanouil Benetos, Elio Quinton, George Fazekas, Dmitry Bogdanov)
• ST-ITO: Controlling audio effects for style transfer with inference-time optimization (Christian J. Steinmetz, Shubhr Singh, Marco Comunità, Ilias Ibnyahya, Shanxin Yuan, Emmanouil Benetos, Joshua D. Reiss)

Congratulations to all! You can explore AIM’s contributions for ISMIR 2024 at: https://www.aim.qmul.ac.uk/aim-at-ismir-2024/

The music in toy commercials might be shaping how children see themselves and the world! A new study, published in PLOS ONE, from Queen Mary University of London reveals that sound in toy ads isn’t just background noise — it’s actively reinforcing gender stereotypes.

AIM PhD student Luca Marinelli, supervised by Dr Charalampos Saitis (C4DM – COMMA) and in collaboration with Prof Petra Lucht (Center for Interdisciplinary Women’s and Gender Studies at TU Berlin) found that ads targeting boys often feature intense, abrasive sounds, while those for girls use softer, harmonious music. These choices subtly reinforce ideas of “masculine” and “feminine” play from an early age.

Read more about the research and see the data firsthand:
https://www.qmul.ac.uk/media/news/2024/se/new-study-sheds-light-on-the-role-of-sound-and-music-in-gendered-toy-marketing.html

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