INESC TEC researcher awarded in international competition
Fabien Gouyon, a researcher at INESC TEC’s Telecommunications and Multimedia Unit (UTM), was awarded as part of the international competition “Reproducibility in Audio and Music Research”, promoted by the SoundSoftware.ac.uk service. The results were announced on 26 June.
The researcher was awarded in the "Journal submission" category, following the submission of the paper titled “Comments on ‘Automatic Classification of Musical Genres Using Inter-Genre Similarity’”, written in co-authorship with Bob Sturm, a professor at the University of Aalborg in Copenhagen, Denmark. The paper addresses the limitations of previous research on the automatic classification of music genres. According to the reviewers, this work “represents a strong contribution to the area”, and the researchers have managed to demonstrate “the reproducibility of the data presented in the paper”.
The goal of this competition is to promote the development of sustainable and reusable software on audio and music research. The service SoundSoftware.ac.uk (Sustainable Software for Audio and Music Research), located in Queen Mary University in London, aims at providing resources, tutorials and workshops to the entire community conducting research in this area.
Fabien Gouyon is a senior researcher and a French national who has been working at UTM since 2007. Together with Carlos Guedes, also from UTM, he founded the group SMC – Sound and Music Computing. This group conducts research on signal processing, pattern recognition and human-machine interaction in order to allow computers to better understand, model and generate sounds and music. Palco 3.0, Kinetic and GimmeDaBlues (the latter being winner of the 2011 ZON Creativity Award in Multimedia) are just some of the most important project developed by the group. More recent projects include the RobotDance and the research programme MAT – Media Arts and Technology.
It is important to highlight that in 2009 Fabien Gouyon was responsible for organising the Conference SMC – Sound and Music Computing, a forum to promote the exchange of ideas and experiences in this interdisciplinary area that combines scientific, technological and artistic methodologies in order to understand, model and generate sounds and music using computational approaches. This conference was an important milestone because it was the first time that the event was held in Portugal, putting INESC TEC in the international scene in this area. Another important event was the 13th edition of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2012), also organised by the researcher. This is an international forum for processing, researching, organising and accessing music.
The INESC TEC researchers mentioned in this article are associated with the following partner institutions: FEUP and INESC Porto.