Who we are

Based at the Centre for Digital Music (C4DM) at Queen Mary University of London, this service provides developer resources, tutorials, workshops and advice to help the whole audio and music research community.

Updated: September 2014

Who we are

Mark Plumbley is Director of C4DM and leads the SoundSoftware initiative. His work in audio signal analysis includes beat tracking, music transcription, source separation and object coding, using techniques such as neural networks, independent component analysis, sparse representations and Bayesian modelling. Prof Plumbley is Chair of the International Independent Component Analysis Steering Committee, a member of the IEEE Machine Learning in Signal Processing Technical Committee, and an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks. He leads the ICA Research Network and Digital Music Research Network.

Luis Figueira is a software developer with almost a decade of experience with C/C++, Scheme, Web technologies and databases. He has an MSc in Electrotechnical and Computers Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, where he specialized in digital signal processing with a focus on speech synthesis. Luis subsequently worked in a speech technology spin-off and an open-source web development company.

Chris Cannam is a software developer with 20 years commercial and open-source development experience. While at the C4DM he has worked on the widely-used Sonic Visualiser cross-platform audio analysis and visualisation application; Sonic Annotator, a tool for batch extraction of meaningful features from audio files; the Vamp plugin API for audio feature extraction, and many plugins using this API; and tools and ontologies for music description using RDF within the Semantic Web. Previously he developed studio-focused and real-time audio and music software and has also worked in Internet, finance, and oil E&P industries.

Carl Bussey is a software developer with strong experience in digital signal processing and software engineering, and a particular interest in machine learning, code optimisation, and mathematics. He graduated with a Masters in Digital Audio and Music Systems engineering from Queen Mary having focused on developing psychoacoustic-aided tools for sound mixing and music analysis.

Local Co-Investigators

Josh Reiss is a Senior Lecturer in the C4DM. Dr Reiss is active in the Audio Engineering Society (AES), including as a member of the Review Board for the Journal of the AES, a member of the Technical Council, and vice-chair of the Technical Committee on High-resolution Audio.

Mark Sandler is Chief Scientist and former director of C4DM. He became a Professor of Signal Processing at Queen Mary in 2001, following 19 years at King’s College, where he was also Professor of Signal Processing. Prof Sandler is Chair of the Audio Engineering Society Technical Committee on Semantic Audio Analysis. He is a Fellow of IET and AES and consults to the UK Technology Strategy Board.

Nick Bryan-Kinns investigates engaging interaction in areas such as small-group musical improvisation, and has designed, implemented, and evaluated the novel group-musical environments Daisyphone and Daisyfield. Dr Kinns was involved in developing the musical aspects of two art installations funded under the EPSRC Culture and Creativity Programme (Leonardo-net). He co-chaired the BCS-HCI conference in 2006 and the (re)Actor3 International Conference on Digital Live Art, and was Chair of ACM Creativity and Cognition 2009.

Simon Dixon has published widely on the extraction of musical content from audio signals, including beat tracking, audio alignment, onset detection, characterisation of rhythmic content and performance visualisation. He is author of the beat tracking software “BeatRoot” and the audio alignment software “MATCH”. Dr Dixon was Programme Co-Chair for ISMIR 2007, and co-presented the ISMIR 2006 tutorial on Computational Rhythm Description.

Panos Kudumakis is Research Manager in the C4DM, focusing on media technologies and standardisation (ISO/MPEG, DMP, etc) and managing the Centre’s portfolio on semantic music technologies for internet, broadcasting and mobile applications. Dr Kudumakis has held consultancy positions in private and public sectors, and was the general chair and organiser of the 89th ISO/MPEG, 31st JVT and 38th ITU-T VCEG meetings.

Funding

This initiative is funded by a grant (EP/H043101/1) from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

Tweets by @soundsoftwareuk

Recent notes

MLSP Prizes for Reproducibility: Winners announced!

Announcing the winners of the MLSP 2014 and SoundSoftware.ac.uk Prizes for Reproducibility in Signal Processing, organised by SoundSoftware.ac.uk in conjuction with the IEEE Signal Processing Society for the 2014 IEEE International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing.

SoundSoftware 2014: Videos now available!

The SoundSoftware 2014 workshop, our third annual workshop on software and data in audio and music research, was just as enjoyable as the previous two. Because so much research in this field ends up being expressed through software, a software workshop turns out to be all about the means by which research becomes useful and relevant to people other than the original researchers—fertile ground for interesting and thought-provoking talks.

The workshop videos are now available online at http://soundsoftware.ac.uk/soundsoftware2014, so if you weren't able to make it in person, catch up here!

Our third annual one-day workshop on Software and Data for Audio and Music Research takes place on the 8th of July 2014 at Queen Mary, University of London. The workshop includes talks on issues such as robust software development for audio and music research, reproducible research in general, management of research data, and open access. Read more here, clear your calendar, and register now!