News

Co-authored paper accepted to the Web Audio Conference 2021

May 2021

The Web Audio Conference 2021 will take place between July 5th and 7th 2021 in Barcelona.

In the context of the TROMPA project, we wrote a paper about CANTAMUS: an online platform for choir rehearsals that combines the latest research on singing voice synthesis with an algortithm for the assessment of the singers' intonation.

We co-authored this paper with Voctro Labs, a company based in Barcelona, and also partners of the TROMPA project. They were in charge of the development of the platform, while we (UPF) developed the intonation assessment algorithm that allows the singer to get feedback about how accurate their singing was in each note of a singing performance.

The paper is co-authored with Matan Gover, Álvaro Sarasua, Hector Parra, Jordi Janer, and Oscar Mayor from Voctro Labs, and Aggelos Gkiokas, Pili Pascual, and Emilia Gómez from MTG-UPF. Here's the paper reference, to appear in the WAC2021 proceedings:

Gover, M., Sarasua, A., Parra, H., Janer, J., Mayor, O., Cuesta, H. Gkiokas, A., Pascual, M.P., Gómez, E. (2021). Choir Singers Platform -- An online platform for choir singers practice. To appear in Proceedings of the Web Audio Conference (WAC). Barcelona, Spain.

ISMIR 2020

November 6th 2020

The ISMIR 2020 conference took place last month (Oct 12th-15th) in a virtual form. We presented three papers related to our research on polyphonic vocal music:

• Multiple F0 Estimation in Vocal Ensembles using Convolutional Neural Networks, with Brian McFee and Emilia Gómez. Poster, paper, and video.
• A Deep Learning Based Analysis-synthesis Framework for Unison Singing, with Pritish Chandna and Emilia Gómez. Poster, paper, and video.
• Deep Learning Based Source Separation Applied to Choir Ensembles, with Darius Petermann, Pritish Chandna, Jordi Bonada, and Emilia Gómez. Poster, paper, and video.

In the three poster sessions (on Slack!) we had very interesting discussions with other attendees, and got really useful feedback to continue our work on the topic.

New academic year, new teaching

October 23rd 2020

This month we start a new academic year at UPF. I am a teaching assistant of the undergraduate course Acoustic Engineering, and I'm in charge of the labs and part of the seminars of the course. We have 33 students enrolled in the course this year, which is especially challenging due to covid-19 circumstances. We started off the academic year with a hybrid teaching strategy: lectures and labs were supposed to happen remotely, while seminars should be in-person. However, we keep changing plans follwing the new restrictions, and we moved to a full-online course soon after we started.

This new online teaching situation is very challenging for everyone: teachers and students. Although we're doing our best to be connected and help students make the best out of the class, it's sometimes difficult to engage them in the activities. We adopted a flipped-classroom-like style for the course, which basically means that we give the students the content in the form of videos or documents, and then host live Q&A sessions with them. While some of them actively attend these sessions and interact with each other, the majority are just passively attending the sessions. While this is a perfectly valid option, it might not be ideal for the learning process. We'll see how this evolves throughout the term, and try to adapt to the circumstances as good as we can.