On Wednesday, 19th November, at 18:00h in room 52.412, Geoffroy Peeters from IRCAM and Petri Toiviainen from University of Jyväskylä will give two seminars.

18h: Geoffroy Peeters on "Recent Advances in Music Information Retrieval at IRCAM"
19h: Petri Toiviainen on "Acoustic, behavioural and neural correlates of polyphonic timbre"

Abstract Geoffroy Peeters: In this talk, we review recent advances in  Music Information Retrieval at IRCAM. We focus on the "copy and scale" method which aims at replacing signal-processing algorithm for the estimation of local features; the use of Universal-Background-Model for music classification and similarity and the description of the Production Effects of recorded music.

Abstract Petri Toiviainen: Polyphonic timbre is has perceptual significance in, for instance, the identification of genre, artist, and  musical affect. It also has significance for computational categorization of music. Its perceptual constituents have however so far received little attention. I will review the work performed in our lab on the perception of polyphonic timbre. This includes determining the dimensionality and configuration of perceptual polyphonic timbre space  as well as the acoustical correlates of the perceptual dimensions of polyphonic timbre. A further question that we have tackled is the effect
of enculturation and musical training on the aforementioned issues. Moreover, I will discuss our research on neural correlates of polyphonic timbre and other musical elements. Our approach utilizes a novel paradigm, in which real music is presented to participants while their brain activity is scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Subsequently, the thus obtained dynamic brain activity patterns are correlated with musical features that are computationally extracted from the stimulus to identify brain areas involved in the processing of these features.