This was my second ISMIR, and I am super excited of being part of this amazing, diverse, and so inclusive community. It was fun to keep putting faces (and height, and weight) to these names I respect so much! This ISMIR has been very special for me, because I was returning to the city where I kicked off my academic career (5 years ago I was starting a research internship @ IRCAM!), and we won the best student paper award!
Category Archives: Conferences
ISMIR’s best student paper award!
ISMIR article: End-to-end learning for music audio tagging at scale
Our accepted ISMIR paper on music auto-tagging at scale is now online – read it on arXiv, and listen to our demo!
TL;DR:
1) Given that enough training data is available: waveform models (sampleCNN) > spectrogram models (musically motivated CNN).
2) But spectrogram models > waveform models when no sizable data are available.
3) Musically motivated CNNs achieve state-of-the-art results for the MTT & MSD datasets.
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Takeaways from the Google Speech Summit 2018
After assisting to the Google Speech Summit 2018, I can adventure to say that Google’s speech interests for the future are: (i) to continue improving their automatic speech recognition (w/ Listen, Attend and Spell, a seq2seq model) and speech synthesis (w/ Tacotron 2 + Wavenet/WaveRNN) systems so that a robust interface is available for their conversational agent; (ii) they want to keep simplifying pipelines – having less “separated” blocks in order to be end-to-end whenever is possible; (iii) they are studying how to better control some aspects of their end-to-end models – for example, with style tokens they aim to control some Tacotron (synthesis) parameters; and (iv) lots of efforts are put in building the Google Assistant, a conversational agent that I guess will be the basis of their next generation of products.
The following lines aim to summarize (by topics) what I found relevant – and, ideally, describe some details that are not in the papers.
My ICASSP 2018 highlights
This year’s ICASSP keywords are: generative adversarial networks (GANs), wavenet, speech enhancement, source separation, industry, music transcription, cover song identification, sampleCNN, monophonic pitch tracking, and gated/dilated CNNs. This time, passionate scientific discussions happened in random sport bars at downtown Calgary – next to dirty snow piles that were melting.
