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Dr Charalampos Saitis

Charalampos

Lecturer in Digital Music Processing

Email: c.saitis@qmul.ac.uk
Room Number: Engineering, Eng 111
Twitter: @noindent

Profile

I am based at the Centre for Digital Music (C4DM), where I study communication acoustics with a focus on timbre perception and “metaphors we listen with”, and their application to research and innovation in digital music. This involves using empirical and computational methods to understand different modalities of experience, interaction, and control between the digital music “user” (listeners, performers, producers) and sound as a multimodal semiotic system. My previous research has focused on verbal-data-driven analysis of cognitive representations of timbre and more recently on digital interactive cross-sensory games. Scholarly contributions include co-editing the scientific volumes Timbre: Acoustics, Perception, & Cognition (2019), the first dedicated to a comprehensive and authoritative presentation of the state of the art in research on this foundational aspect of hearing, and Musical Haptics (2018), an original interdisciplinary overview of the role of haptic feedback in musical practice and interaction. I am a founding member of the International Conference on Timbre.

I am associate member of the Music Cognition Lab and the Cognitive Science Research Group, member of he Institute of Applied Data Science (IADS), deputy director of the DAME CDT, and coordinate the C4DM Special Interest Group in Neural Audio Synthesis (SIGNAS). Outside QMUL, I am active in the UK Acoustics Network (UKAN), non-partner member of the international Analysis, Creation and Teaching of ORchestration (ACTOR) Partnership, and Turing Fellow and member of the Humanities & Data Science interest group at the Alan Turing Institute.  I was awarded a PhD in music technology from McGill University in 2014. In 2015-16, I joined Fondazione ISI as postdoc in the data science lab. Prior to joining QMUL, I was Humboldt Research Fellow at the Audio Communication Group of TU Berlin in 2016-19.

I am a member of the EECS Equalities Committee, EECS Race Equality Champion, and a member of the QMUL Racial Equality Action Group.

 

Teaching

Interactive Digital Multimedia Techniques (Postgraduate)

This is a Master's level course in developing real-time interactive digital media systems. The course will focus on graphics and sound programming, with a secondary emphasis on basic electronic hardware design for sensors and human-computer interfaces. The course will employ widely-used development environments including Arduino, Processing Max/MSP and Jitter, Processing. Course material will be delivered through a combination of lectures, interactive lab sessions, and individual/group exercises (both in and out of class). Generally speaking, each class period will consist of a combination of lecture and interactive lab session.

Professional and Research Practice (Undergraduate)

This module provides you with the opportunity to examine the role of engineering in society and the expectations of society for a professional engineer. During the module, you should develop and achieve a level of written and spoken communication expected of a professional engineer. You will also construct a personal development plan (PDP) and an on-going employability skills folder. The assessment of the module is 100 per cent coursework, broken down as follows: oral presentation: 25 per cent; in-class essay: 25 per cent; PDP folder: 25 per cent; employability folder: 25 per cent. Not open to Associate Students or students from other departments.

Signals and Information (Undergraduate)

This first year module introduces the fundamentals of signals, Fourier Series, information theory and signal statistics. Topics covered include: signal fundamentals such as discrete versus continuous time signals; signal average, energy and power; orthogonality; Fourier Series. The module also provides an introduction to information theory, including the information measure, entropy and the binary symmetric channel. Basic ideas in statistics will also be introduced. It will be taught by a combination of lectures, tutorials and labs.

Electronic Engineering Mathematics 2 (Undergraduate)

This module covers topics in engineering mathematics relevant to Electronics and Electrical Engineering programs: Vector Calculus (field theory, surface and volume integration, field operators), linear algebra (matrices and matrix operations, applications to systems of equations, reduced Row Echelon Form, determinants, Cramer's rule, eigenvalues and eigenvectors), differential equations (solving first and second order DEs).

Research

Research Interests:

  • Perception, cognition & aesthetics of sound
  • Crossmodal & multisensory perception involving sound
  • Enabling digital audio with an understanding of how we listen
  • Modelling human values (& biases) with digital music data
  • Digital tools for education, outreach, & research

PhD students:

Primary supervisor

  • Luca Marinelli: Gender-coded sound: A multimodal data-driven analysis of gender encoding strategies in sound and music for advertising (09/2020–current)
  • Ben Hayes: Perceptually Motivated Deep Learning Approaches to Creative Sound Synthesis (09/2020–current, co-supervised with George Fazekas)
  • Vjosa Preniqi: Predicting psychological traits from digital media behaviours (01/2021–current, co-supervised with Kyriaki Kalimeri)
  • Bleiz Del Sette: The Sound of Care: researching the use of deep learning and sonification for the daily support of people with chronic pain (09/2021–current)
  • Remi Falowo: E-AIM: Embodied Cognition in Intelligent Musical Emotion Systems (09/2021–current)
  • Maryam Fayaz Torshizi: Music mood modelling using Knowledge Graphs and Graph Neural Nets (09/2021–current, co-supervised with George Fazekas)
  • Jincheng Zhang: Controllable music generation using deep learning (09/2021–current, co-supervised with George Fazekas)

Active second supervisor

  • Cyrus Vahidi: Psychoacoustics in Generative Audio Modelling (09/2019–current)
  • Alejandro Delgado: Drum Sound Query by Vocal Percussion (10/2018–current)

Collaborators:

I'm pleased to be working with some great people across different research fields. This includes researchers in my home group the Centre for Digital Music, plus QMUL colleague Martin Benning (Mathematics). Outside QMUL, collaborators include Christine Cuskley (Newcastle, UK), Kyriaki Kalimeri (Fondazione ISI, Turin, Italy), Kai Siedenburg (Oldenburg, Germany), and Zachary Wallmark (Oregon, USA).

 

Publications

Supervision

Current PhD funding opportunities for September 2022 entry include:

Applicants are encouraged to contact me before submitting their application – please send an email with your CV and draft research proposal. Suggested PhD topics include: