We have new sounds in the Project Sounds of Science! After the fist entry, this time we have sounds courtesy of members from the Music Technology Group (MTG) – thanks David Blanco, Sergio Giraldo, Jordi Pons, Juan Gomez and Rafael Caro - and from the Natural Language Processing Research Group (TALN) – thanks Monica Domínguez and Carla Ten. get inspired and contribute to the project! (tomorrow we will have a first open workshop to support recording if you need it, or just upload sounds in Freesound following these instructions).
The Music Technology Group (MTG) carries out research on topics such as audio signal processing, music information retrieval, musical interfaces, and computational musicology, with a balance between basic and applied research while promoting interdisciplinary approaches that incorporate knowledge and methodologies from both scientific/technological and humanistic/artistic disciplines.
As the subject of study is sound itself, below a couple of examples of the type of samples used in their research. For instance, this is the start of the recording of a violin for an experiment conducted at the Music and Machine Learning Lab.
Or a general beat following
Of course, one of the most popular results from the MTG is the Reactable instrument, and it had to be part of the selection!
The members of the Natural Language Processing Group (TALN) do research on different aspects of Natural Language Processing such as Computational Lexicology, Language-oriented Machine Learning, Knowledge Extraction, Multilingual Natural Language Generation, Text simplification, Summarization, and Speech Prosody. Special focus is put on application-oriented NLP and synergies with other fields of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. While some samples linked to speech synthesis are being prepared (it is quite challenging for the moment to find sounds that reflect work on NLP!), below two examples linked to their work. On the one hand, a special mechanical keyboard from the lab (can you spot the difference with yours?) . A keyboard is a key previous elements, as it is one of the main inputs for the texts to be later analysed). On the other, non-verbal information is also relevant when building conversational agents (see a sample work here). Hand-clapping is an example of a gesture that produces sounds. Can you think of others?
But there are also many sounds very common to the life of any academic researcher, but are most likely common to any researcher working in ICT (and many other domains), such as
(the samples were recorded at the MTG also)
Even the traditional blackboard
Finally, here you can find pictures of the building were the Department of Information and Communication Technologies is located and, below, two specific sounds
