Speaker：Dr. Masataka Goto (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan )
Topic : Frontiers of Music Technologies: Active Music Listening Interfaces and Singing Synthesis Systems
[ABSTRACT]
In this talk, I introduce the frontiers of music technologies by showing some examples of our research on active music listening interfaces and singing synthesis systems.
Active music listening interfaces demonstrate how end users can benefit from music understanding technologies. Active music listening aims at allowing the user tounderstand better the music he or she listens to and to actively influence the listening experience. For example, a web service for active music listening, "Songle" (http://songle.jp), facilitates deeper understanding of music by visualizing its music scene descriptions estimated automatically, such as music structure, hierarchical beat structure, melody line, and chords. The user can actively browse a song by jumping to a chorus or repeated section during playback.
Singing synthesis systems, "VocaListener" and "VocaWatcher", imitate singing expressions of the voice and face of a human singer. VocaListener can synthesize natural singing voices by analyzing and imitating the pitch and dynamics of the human singing. VocaWatcher can generate realistic facial motions of a humanoid robot by analyzing and imitating facial motions of a human singing that are recorded by a single video camera. These systems that focus on "imitation" are not only promising for representing human-like naturalness, but also useful for providing intuitive control means.
[BIO]
Masataka Goto received the Doctor of Engineering degree from Waseda University in 1998. He is currently a Prime Senior Researcher and the Leader of the Media Interaction Group at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan. In 1992 he was one of the first to start work on automatic music understanding, and has since been at the forefront of research in music technologies and music interfaces based on those technologies. Since 1998 he has also worked on speech recognition interfaces, and since 2006 he has developed web services based on content analysis and crowdsourcing (http://songle.jp andhttp://en.podcastle.jp). He serves concurrently as a Visiting Professor at the Institute of Statistical Mathematics, an Associate Professor (Cooperative Graduate School Program) in the Graduate School of Systems and Information Engineering, University of Tsukuba, and a Project Manager of the Exploratory IT Human Resources Project (MITOH Program) run by the Information Technology Promotion Agency (IPA).
Over the past 21 years, Masataka Goto has published more than 190 papers in refereed journals and international conferences and has received 31 awards, including several best paper awards, best presentation awards, and the Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (Young Scientists' Prize). He has served as a committee member of over 80 scientific societies and conferences and was the Chair of the IPSJ (Information Processing Society of Japan) Special Interest Group on Music and Computer (SIGMUS) in 2007 and 2008 and the General Chair of the 10th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2009). In 2011, as the Research Director he began a 5-year research project (OngaCREST Project) on music technologies, a project funded by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (CREST, JST).
Date : 13:30 to 15:00 Wednesday 24- Apr-2013
Place : 103 Delta Building (台達館)
All faculty and students are welcome to attend
