Seminar Audio Processing and Indexing

( Will be updated. Last update: September 12th 2025. )

Contents

• Period

• Time

• Place

• Organizers

• Abstract

• Requirements

• Materials

• Schedule

• Previous Projects

• 
  Links
  

Period: Fall September 4^th - November 27^th 2025

Time:   Thursday 15.15 - 17.00

Place:  See: MyTimeTable

Organizers:

Lecturer:

Dr Erwin M. Bakker ( erwin@liacs.nl )

LIACS Media Lab (LML)

Teaching assistant:

to be announced

NB Register on Brightspace.

Abstract:

During this seminar the fundamentals of audio processing and indexing will be studied. Applications in the area of speech recognition amd understanding, audio synthesis and content based audio retrieval will be studied and presented by the participants.

The seminar starts with several lectures and accompanying assignments in the form of workshops (@Home); followed by a literature selection, study, and presentations by all the students; the seminar ends with final project demos / presentations.

Requirements: C, C++

Grading (6 ECTS): Presentations (20% of the final grade) and Project (40% of the final grade). Class discussions, attendance, and workshops (40% of the final grade). It is necessary to be at every class and to complete every workshop. If you can not be there, you must contact Dr. E.M. Bakker before class!

Materials:

Lecture slides and further materials will be made available on this site.

List of recommended books:

Discrete-Time Speech Signal Processing, Principles and Practice by T.F. Quatieri, Prentice Hall PTR; ISBN 013242942, 2002.

Fundamentals of Speech Recognition by Lawrence Rabiner, and Biing-Hwang Juang (Hardcover, 507 pages; Publisher: Pearson Education POD; ISBN: 0130151572; 1st edition, April 12, 1993)

Spoken Language Processing: A Guide to Theory, Algorithm and System Development by Xuedong Huang , Alex Acero , Hsiao-Wuen Hon , Raj Reddy (Hardcover, 980 pages; Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR; ISBN: 0130226165; 1st edition, April 25, 2001) 

Speech Recognition: Theory and C++ Implementation by Claudio Bechetti and Lucio Prina Ricotti (Hardcover, 407 pages; Publisher: John Wiley & Sons; ISBN: 0471977306; 1st edition April, 1999)

Links

• ISMIR ( Proceedings )
  
• Interspeech ( Proceedings )
• Eurasip
• ISCA Online Archive

Journals

You have access to all of the listed journals by using your ULCN-
account (for further details see http://www.bibliotheek.leidenuniv.nl/ ):

• International Journal of Speech Technology

• Journal of Phonetics

• Speech Communication

• Computer Speech & Language

• Digital Signal Processing

• International Journal of Human-Computer

• Studies

• Interacting with Computers

• Signal Processing

• Pattern Recognition Letters

• Artificial Intelligence

• Engineering Applications of Artificial

• Intelligence

• Journal of Voice

• Neurocomputing

• http://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/archive/online-archive

Assignments (Workshops@Home):

1. Vocal Tract Workshop (available on Brightspace, due Monday 22-9 2025 at 23.59)
   
2. FFT Workshop and audio_data.
   
3. Audio Features Workshop and data.
   
4. Machine Learning Workshop.
   

• TBA
  
  

Student Paper-Presentations Session (examples from previous years)

• Guitar Tablature Estimation with a Convolutional Neural Network.
• Multimodal Classification of Emotions in Latin Music.
• An Early Study on Intelligent Analysis of Speech under COVID-19: Severity, Sleep Quality, Fatigue, and Anxiety.
• Speech Emotion Recognition with deep learning.
• VocGAN: A High-Fidelity Real-Time Vocoder with a Hierarchically-Nested Adversarial Network.
• Ddsp: Differentiable digital signal processing.
• Speaker discrimination in humans and machines: Effects of speaking style variability.

Previous Project Titles and Pages
2022

• Music Analyzer - Information Extraction and Visualization
• Exploring the limits of DDSP
• GAN Networks for Audio Generation: A Comparative Study
• Mapping LPC predictor coefficients to reflection coefficients of an N-tube 2-Dimensional waveguide filter in real-time
• Music Genre Classification and Noise Separation
• Audio Processing and Indexing Musical Instrument Identification
• MusicCNN for DMX Lightning Software Automation
  

• Audio Source Separation
• AudioVibe
• Heart Sound Classification with Deep Learning
• Guitar Tabular Estimation
• Rain Forest Connection Species Audio Detection
• Voice Style Transfer ( github )
  
• On automated clique detection and personalized music generation
• Speech Emotion Recognition
• Wave Generation for Electronic Music
• Audio Translation and Style Transfer
• Automatic Valence and Arousal Recognition in Music (code)
  

• Artist Recognition with Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks
• A Deep Learning Approach to Instrument Detection and
  Chord Estimation via Frequency-based Feature Extraction
• MIDIoke
• Towards Real Time Audio Mosaicing
• SoundBridge
• Automatically Identifying and Fixing Single Channel Audio Defects in Stereo Audio
• Open-Air Acoustic Delay-line Memory using SAMD21 / Arduino M0+

• Second Voice Generation
• Robustness of Musical Genre Identification
• Improved Mobile Song Recognition
• An iOS App using Bliss for Improved Communication through Text-To-Speech
• ScoreAid
• Emotion Recognition
• Instrument Detection
• Musical Instrument Recognizer ( Annotation  )
• Audio Feature Extraction with Deep Belief Networks
• Audio Morphing
• Audio Indexing the 1.000.000 song data set
• Chord Recognition
• Audio Phantom Materialization
• Harmonic Model Based Audio Transformations
• Content-Based Music Similarity, Visualization and Automatic Play-List Generation.
• Indexing and Predicting Bands from Unknown Songs
• Interpolation between Different Instruments
• Modular Synthesizer
• Hit Predictor
• Pitch Perfector
• Inter-Voice Morphing

Presentations

During the seminar we will study state-of-the-art audio indexing methods and techniques using recent scientific publications from international journals, workshops, and conferences on content based audio retrieval.

Each student will present a recent or seminal technical refereed research paper:

• Each student will have to select 1 very recent scientific publications on an audio related subject.

• Each student will study the selected paper into great detail, and present it during a 10 minutes talk followed by 3 minutes of questions for a critical audience.

• In order to ensure a critical audience, every student in class is expected to have read at least the title, abstract and conclusions of the papers to be presented. Also every student is expected to have prepared at least one question per paper (organization will be discussed in class).

Projects

During the seminar each student has to do a project related to audio processing/synthesis/indexing.

The agenda for the projects is as follows (see Brightspace):

1. Project proposal presentation (4 slides):

   • Title of the proposal+group members (1-4 members).

   • Problem description.

   • Challenges.

   • What will be the goal for the Final Project Presentation/Demo.
     

   • Note: If the group consists of more than 1 member, add a 5th slide with an initial global division of the work between project members. This slide does not have to be presented.
     

2. Project status reports.

3. Final project presentation / demo.

4. Final technical project paper.

Project Web Pages

Every student has to maintain a project web page or github on which progress, documents, code, links, etc. related to the project are maintained. Here you can find an example project page. Feel free to design your own project web page though. Do not forget to mail me the link to your project page.

Note: Using your university account you can put your web-page under a directory \home\public_html.