MIR as Opportunity for Interdisciplinary Research (or: From the Life of a Figure Junkie)
Music is a ubiquitous and vital part of our lives. We interact with music in a variety of ways, both as listeners and active participants. Given the increasing amount of digital music, the development of computational tools that allow users to find, organize, analyze, and interact with music has become central to our research field known as Music Information Retrieval (MIR). In this talk, I want to show that music not only connects people but also yields an intuitive entry point to research in various disciplines, including digital signal processing, information retrieval, machine learning, musicology, library science, and digital humanities. MIR offers the opportunity for interdisciplinary research, naturally bridging the gap between engineering and the humanities. However, multidisciplinary research comes at a cost: it takes more time, it is less likely to be funded, and it requires communication skills. In particular, we need to explain our ideas and techniques in an intuitive fashion, accounting for non-experts and researchers who are not familiar with our field. Using some representative MIR topics, I want to demonstrate how one may convey even complex algorithms by working with sound examples, overlay figures, and plenty of illustrations. Our community offers numerous open-source software tools (such as LibROSA or the FMP notebooks) for learning, teaching, and generating educational material for lectures and presentations. Make use of these tools!
Reference:
Meinard Müller,
Fundamentals of Music Processing — Audio, Analysis, Algorithms, Applications.
Springer Verlag, ISBN: 978-3-319-21944-8, 2015.
Weblink (FMP notebooks): https://www.audiolabs-erlangen.de/FMP
About the speaker:
Meinard Müller studied mathematics (Diplom) and computer science (Ph.D.) at the University of Bonn, Germany. In 2002/2003, he conducted postdoctoral research in combinatorics at the Mathematical Department of Keio University, Japan. In 2007, he finished his Habilitation at Bonn University in the field of multimedia retrieval. From 2007 to 2012, he was a member of the Saarland University and the Max-Planck Institut für Informatik. Since September 2012, Meinard Müller holds a professorship for Semantic Audio Processing at the International Audio Laboratories Erlangen, which is a joint institution of the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) and the Fraunhofer-Institut für Integrierte Schaltungen IIS. His recent research interests include music processing, music information retrieval, audio signal processing, and motion processing. Meinard Müller has been a member of the IEEE Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing Technical Committee from 2010 to 2015 and is a member of the Board of Directors of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) since 2009. He wrote a monograph titled “Information Retrieval for Music and Motion” (Springer, 2007) as well as a textbook titled “Fundamentals of Music Processing” (Springer, 2015, www.music-processing.de).