Emilia Gómez
Associate Professor, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Computational models of symphonic music: challenges and opportunities
Full set of keynote videos at bit.ly/mcm2015-keynotes.
Abstract: An orchestral classical concert embraces a wealth of musical information, which may not be easily perceived or understood for general audiences. Current machine listening and visualization technologies can facilitate the appreciation of distinct musical facets, contributing to innovative and more enjoyable concert experiences. This presentation provides an overview of the challenges and opportunities that symphonic music poses for these technologies. We will summarize our current efforts in the improving of state-of-the-art methods for melody extraction, tonal analysis, and source separation when applied to this particular repertoire. Special emphasis will be given to the combination of symbolic, audio and gestural music descriptors, and to the development of meaningful visualizations designed to be exploited in off-line and live concert situations.
Biosketch: Emilia Gómez is an Associate Professor (Serra-Húnter Fellow) at the Music Technology Group, Department of Information and Communication Technologies, Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. She graduated as a Telecommunication Engineer at Universidad de Sevilla (Spain) and she studied classical piano performance at Seville Conservatoire of Music. She then received a DEA in Acoustics, Signal Processing and Computer Science applied to Music (ATIAM) at IRCAM, Paris (France) and a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Digital Communication at the UPF (awarded by EPSON foundation). Her research is within the Music Information Retrieval (MIR) field. She tries to understand and enhance music listening experiences by automatically extracting descriptors from music signals. She has designed algorithms able to describe music signals in terms of melody, tonality, and, by incorporating machine learning techniques, she has been able to model high-level concepts such as similarity, style or emotion. Emilia Gómez has co-authored more than a 100 publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals and conferences. She has contributed to more than 15 research projects, most of them funded by the European Commission and Spanish Government. She is elected member-at-large of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR). At the moment, she contributes to the COFLA project on computational analysis of flamenco music and she is the principal investigator for the European research project PHENICX, trying to innovate the way we experience classical music concerts.
Personal website: emiliagomez.wordpress.com