Time: 3:00 - 4:00pm Venue: BR 3.02 Bancroft Road Teaching Rooms Peter Landin Building London E1 4NS
Leveraging Repetition to Parse the Auditory Scene Recently there has been a convergence of research on the role of repetition in audio parsing by humans and machines. In this talk, Bryan Pardo will discuss how the concept of repetition can help bootstrap source separation and object recognition in humans and by machine. He will begin by presenting results from research on human sound segregation that indicate that repetition of a sound source provides a neglected but powerful cue for segregation. He will then transition to related work applying repetition to audio source separation. He will first present the REpeating Pattern Extraction Technique (REPET), a novel approach for separating a repeating background from a non-repeating foreground in a musical context. He will then describe extensions of REPET that handle variations in the repeating structure. This will be followed by a discussion of the relationship between these explicitly repetition-based algorithms to other separation algorithms that implicitly use repetition (e.g. robust Principal Component Analysis and Non-Negative Matrix Factorization).
Biography: Bryan Pardo, head of the Northwestern University Interactive Audio Lab, is an associate professor in the Northwestern University Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science with an additional appointment in the Music Theory and Cognition Department. Prof. Pardo received a M. Mus. in Jazz Studies in 2001 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2005, both from the University of Michigan. He has authored over 70 peer-reviewed publications. He is an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing. He has developed speech analysis software for the Speech and Hearing department of the Ohio State University, statistical software for SPSS and worked as a machine learning researcher for General Dynamics. While finishing his doctorate, he taught in the Music Department of Madonna University. When he’s not programming, writing or teaching, he performs throughout the United States on saxophone and clarinet at venues such as Albion College, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Detroit Concert of Colors, Bloomington Indiana’s Lotus Festival and Tucson’s Rialto Theatre.