PhD fellowship on “Audio-Visual Approaches for Music Content Description”

The Music Technology Group and the Image Processing Group of the Department of Information and Communication Technologies, Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona are opening a joint PhD fellowship in the topic of “Audio-Visual Approaches for Music Content Description” to start in the Fall of 2014.

Topic:

Music is a highly multimodal concept, where various types of heterogeneous information are associated to a music piece (audio,musician’s gestures and facial expression, lyrics, etc.). This has recently led researchers to apprehend music through its various facets, giving rise to multimodal music analysis studies.

The goal of this fellowship is to research on the complementarity of audio and image description technologies to improve the accuracy and meaningfulness of state of the art music description methods. These methods are the core of content-based music information retrieval tasks. Several standard tasks could benefit from it: Structural analysis and segmentation, Discovery of Repeated Themes & Sections, Music similarity computation and music retrieval, Genre / style classification, Artist identification and Emotion (Mood) Characterization.

This PhD will be linked to ongoing funded research projects at the MTG and GPI, such as PHENICX (Performances as Highly Enriched aNd Interactive Concert eXperiences), ‘Inpainting Tools for Video Post-production. Variational theory and fast algorithms’, SIGMUS (SIGnal analysis for the discovery of traditional MUSic repertoire) and MTM2012-30772.

Requirements:

Applicants should have experience in audio and image signal processing, and hold a MSc in a related field (e.g.
telecommunications, electrical engineering, physics, mathematics, or computer science). Experience in scientific programming (Matlab/Python/C++) and excellent English are essential. Musical background and expertise on multimedia information retrieval will be considered.

The grant involves teaching assistance, so interest for teaching is also valued.

More information:

http://www.upf.edu/dtic_doctorate/
http://www.upf.edu/dtic_doctorate/phd_fellowships.html
http://mtg.upf.edu
http://gpi.upf.edu