CrestMuse & SIGMUS

On Thursday we had a CrestMuse project presentation in Osaka. (That’s the project I’m working on.) Several partners are involved who work on a wide range of very interesting projects related to music. Somehow they managed to get over 100 people to attend (and I was told that they didn’t do much advertisement). They even had to reject a large number of students because they ran out of seats in the lecture room.

The meeting took place on the 14th floor of a stylish skyscraper. I would have never guessed that we were actually in university offices. The location was great (right in the city center). The view of the city was great too. However, the strangest thing was that the university was sharing a building with a hotel (which looked really nice), and a fancy restaurant. (And probably a number of companies.) Masataka told me that he thinks “normal” students don’t study there, but he wasn’t sure what kind of students actually do.

View of Osaka from one of the rooms where the demonstrations were given.



The project presentation consisted of lots of demonstrations (including stuff I’ve been working on), some overview talks, and a panel discussion. I couldn’t understand the Japanese presentations, but the demonstrations were great, and the best part was to meet many colleagues I had already met in summer. I was also told that the main purpose of such meetings was to get drunk :-)

After going out for some drinks, I spent most of the remaining night writing slides and restructuring them for my invited talk for the next morning… The next day a SIGMUS meeting took place in the same rooms. SIGMUS is the Japanese special interest group for music. They have several meetings a year in different locations in Japan, the next one (which will be even bigger) is in December in Tokyo. I was impressed how large and how well organized the music research community is in Japan. It seems like a parallel world to the “international community”. Unfortunately many papers never get translated into English. The language barrier is definitely a problem… but the situation seems to be improving. Anyway, the demonstrations were great. Unfortunately, the schedule was very tight and there were lots of people… so I didn’t get to play with the demonstrations as much as I wanted to. I can’t wait until such music interfaces will be available to everyone :-)

This pictures was taken in one of the rooms were the demonstrations were given. There was music from all directions :-)



In the front of the next picture you can see Yoshii's Drumix demonstration. I really enjoyed playing with it! You can put any audio CD into the system, it automatically analyzes the bass and snare drum parts, lets you replace them with other samples, lets you change the rhythm patterns, ...
In the background you can see Hamanaka who also demonstrated his work at ISMIR. Unfortunately the speakers he used at ISMIR didn't make it possible to really understand what his demonstration was about. Anyway, I got another chance to try it out (with headphones) and it was really fun... it takes a bit to get used to how to control the system, but it's fun to play with. Standing in the middle of the demonstration room I could hear different music from all directions. Moving my hand towards my ear I could focus on the music coming from in front of me.



There were lots of other cool demonstrations which I don't have pictures of. I especially liked Ito's work on remixing a piece of music. It was fun to control the loudness of each individual instrument. I think it's a great way for untrained listeners to understand how each instrument contributes to the whole. Ito explaining his system:



I also liked the demonstration by Kitahara who found a clever way to compute similarity on the instrumentation level. I think his approach could help overcome limitations the techniques have which I'm currently working with.

Tommie's demonstration on the evaluation of singing skills was lots of fun, too. Unfortunately his system only gave me 30 out of 100 points... it thought I didn't get my pitch intervals right. I think he still needs to improve it.

There were many more interesting demonstrations. For example, Ohishi demonstrated a nice query-by-humming and speech interface, and Prof. Katayose's team also had a number of very interesting demonstrations which were fun to try out. I also had the opportunity to have interesting conversations with many people, including Keiji Hirata.