Teaching machines how to listen to the environment

by Eduardo Fonseca (researcher at the MTG)

We are constantly hearing sounds, and we are pretty good at recognizing them and knowing what they mean. Wouldn’t it be great if machines could do the same? If they could track what is going on in the environment, or summarize for us what is happening in an audio recording. Wouldn’t it be great if machines could help people with hearing problems to perceive sounds? If they could tell when the microwave is ready or when someone just knocked at the

MTG 2018 highlights

by Xavier Serra (director of the MTG)

This blog post aims to overview the work done at the MTG during 2018, highlighting what we consider to be most relevant.

In relation to research, we first want to highlight the work done around the creation and use of our corpora and datasets. The largest effort was on the creation of FSD dataset and on the platform supporting it, which resulted in the organization of a large and successful machine learning challenge in Kaggle (Fonseca et a

Accessible Music: how technology can allow people with physical disabilities to learn and play music

by Gil Dori (artist in residence and collaborator at the MTG)

Music is powerful. People like to talk about how music has the power to change us, and we all know by feeling that it is true. There is also evidence to the power of music in research. The field of music cognition is abundant with studies and publications (even some by Music Technology Group team members) that prove that music does affect us in many positive ways. However, very rarely do we get to experience something that truly shows us how much power music has; an event that manifests in f