Updated List of MIR PhDs

There's a long-overdue updated version of the list of MIR PhDs. The new entries I've added are Stéphane Rossignol (2000), Juan José Burred (2008), Iman S. H. Suyoto (2008), Matti Ryynänen (2008), Enric Guaus (2009), Claudio Baccigalupo (2009), Klaas Bosteels (2009), Katy Noland (2009), Tim Pohle (2010), and Jouni Paulus (2010). I've also updated some other links. Thanks to everyone who sent me information!!

I've had the pleasure of reading the thesis of Claudio and I can highly recommend it. His enthusiasm is inspiring. It's a great point to start for anyone researching playlist generation.

Another pleasure I've had was to attend the defense of Klaas' thesis. I've been closely following his work for a very long time. I've had the honor to collaborate with him on several occasions, and I'm very pleased that it's him who has taken over some of my previous responsibilities at Last.fm.

I've also been following Katy's and Tim's work for many years. Which makes me wonder how soon until all MIR PhD students I know are done. Until that happens I'll infrequently continue updating this blog and the list.

Updated MIR PhD Theses List

I've updated the list of MIR PhD theses to include the recent work by Antti Eronen on Signal Processing Methods for Audio Classification and Music Content Analysis. Antti covers a broad range of fascinating audio content processing topics such as: instrument classification, classification of ambient environments/backgrounds (libraries, cars, ...), chorus detection, and meter analysis.

Seems like I'm the list is still far from complete. As the following two theses indicate. If you know of any more that I'm missing please let me know. (Thank you Arijit Biswas for your help!)

One that I missed is the work of Michael J. Bruderer on Perception and Modeling of Segment Boundaries in Popular Music. Which describes an interesting series of experiments in which Michael explores which cues listeners use when segmenting music and how they can be modeled.

Another older one I've added is the work of Olivier Gillet Transcription des signaux percussifs. Application à l'analyse de scènes musicales audiovisuelles. Olivier joined Google after his PhD where he worked on the optimization of Google's ad product and on technologies now being used by Google China Music. Olivier is now joining us at Last.fm's to work on fun next generation MIR technologies.

I would also like to mention the Master thesis Implementing a scalable music recommender by Erik Bernhardsson. I really like how Spotify has given him access to their data and let him publish the results. Seems like Spotify was also very happy with his work as they have hired him.

MIR PhD Thesis: Luís Gustavo Martins

Luís Gustavo Martins recently completed his PhD thesis titled A computational Framework for Sound Segregation in Music Signals.

From the abstract: "[...] This dissertation proposes a flexible and extensible Computational Auditory Scene Analysis framework for modeling perceptual grouping in music listening. The goal of the proposed framework is to partition a monaural acoustical mixture into a perceptually motivated topological description of the sound scene (similar to the way a naive listener would perceive it) instead of attempting to accurately separate the mixture into its original and physical sources. [...]"

Luis is probably best known in the MIR community for his contributions to Marsyas (the awesome open source software framework for audio processing with specific emphasis on MIR applications).

If you know of any other dissertations missing in the list of MIR PhDs please let me know.

Recent MIR PhDs

I'm slowly catching up. The following dissertations were added to the list of MIR PhDs:

"Real Time Automatic Harmonisation" by Giordano Cabra. I couldn't find a link to the thesis, but I found a video of the defense. I'd love to see more defense videos (preferably in English).

"Modeling musical anticipation: From the time of music to the music of time" by Arshia Cont.

"Music Recommendation and Discovery in the Long Tail" by Oscar Celma. I highly recommend it!

"From Sparse Models to Timbre Learning: New Methods for Musical Source Separation" by Juan Jose Burred.

UPDATE: I totally missed Yves' announcement on the Music-IR list on Friday. I've added him now too:

"A Distributed Music Information System" by Yves Raimond.

UPDATE 2: Almost forgot that Kris finished recently too:

"Novel Techniques for Audio Music Classification and Search" by Kris West.

Please send me any I might have missed - thanks!

More MIR related PhDs

I've added 5 dissertations to the incomplete list of MIR related PhDs. I'm particularly happy that Markus, Tomoyasu, and Kazuyoshi (all of them are former colleagues of mine) finished their thesis so successfully.

Tomoyasu Nakano recently finished his thesis on "A Study on Developing Applications Systems Based on Singing Understanding and Singing Expression" (in Japanese). He has now joined Masataka Goto's research group as a postdoc and is working on the CrestMuse project. He recently received a lot of attention for his work on optimizing Vocaloid parameters.

Kazuyoshi Yoshii recently finished his thesis on "Studies on Hybrid Music Recommendation Using Timbral and Rhythmic Features". Kazuyoshi was awarded a tenure position at the AIST which is pretty impressive. He joined Masataka's group and is working on CrestMuse.

Markus Schedl recently finished his thesis on "Automatically Extracting, Analyzing, and Visualizing Information on Music Artists from the World Wide Web". As part of his thesis he crawled a very impressive number of web pages to build a retrieval system for 600,000 artists. In the next months he'll be finishing his business studies.

Steven Travis Pope's thesis is already a bit older (2005) and serves as perfect example of how incomplete the list of PhDs is which I maintain. His work was on "Software Models and Frameworks for Sound Composition, Synthesis, and Analysis: The Siren, CSL, and MAK Music Languages".

The 5th PhD thesis I added to the list is Matt Wright's work on "Computer-Based Music Theory and Acoustics" which he completed at CCRMA, Stanford University.

More MIR related PhDs

I just updated the list of MIR PhDs. The most notable update is the thesis by Adam Berenzweig. Unfortunately his thesis is not publicly available for download, but it seems like he has found an answer to why we've been observing hubs using certain similarity measures for music. Quoting from his abstract: "A practical problem with this technique, known as the hub phenomenon, is explored, and we conclude that it is related to the curse of dimensionality."

I'm sure there's still plenty of dissertations missing in the list and I'll be happy to add any that are sent to me. (I'll also be happy to update any broken links or missing information...)

Btw, the list is slowly approaching 100 entries now. The Matlab script I wrote to generate the html files and statistics now takes almost 5 seconds to complete.

2 PhDs and 1 MSc

Matthew Davies recently made his PhD (Towards Automatic Rhythmic Accompaniment) available online.

Arturo Camacho recently announced on the music-ir list that his PhD (SWIPE: A Sawtooth Waveform Inspired Pitch Estimator for Speech and Music) and the corresponding Matlab code are available online.

Claudia Wronski recently finished her Master's thesis (in German) on "Die veränderten Zugriffsmöglichkeiten auf die Ressource Musik – Auswirkungen auf das Kauf-, Nutzungs- und Rezeptionsverhalten der Musikkonsumenten" (freely translated: the changing access to music and its impact on shopping and consumption habits of music listeners). She covers topics such as how the music culture is changing, the crisis of the music industry, the long tail, the emancipation of artists, and the future of music.

Claudia is an active Last.fm user, and has successfully been leading a very interesting user group: The Special Interest Tag Radio Collective.

More PhDs

Hirokazu Kameoka recently completed his PhD thesis on “Statistical Approach to Multipitch Analysis” (PDF) at the University of Tokyo. Hirokazu is now working at NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Media Information Laboratory.

It’s great to see another thesis written in English emerge from Japan. Btw, so far 5 out of 10 who completed their MIR related PhD thesis this year are now living and working in Japan.

In addition, it seems that Don Byrd and Tim Crawford have pointed me to the very first PhD thesis mentioning MIR in the title. It dates back to 1988!

[Email from Tim on 11 June 2007]

Don and Elias,

I have the thesis in front of me:

Stephen Dowland Page, 'Computer Tools for Music Information Retrieval', thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Oxford, New College, 1988. 252 pp. (Available from the Bodleian Library, Oxford.)

Basically it describes a simple encoding, matching and query specification method for monophonic symbolic searching, which uses a query language based on regular expressions. He never got as far as polyphonic queries, though he had hoped to do so (no surprise there!). The introductory chapters, on the nature of the problem and on previous work, are - I would say - still of value, although the methods he describes would need a lot of work to make them useful for polyphonic music. Full code for the search engine is given (in Modula 2!). The ~40-page bibliography is useful for listing a lot of early work - though a vague reference to "Kassler's series of radio talks on the subject" is frustrating, since he gives no further details!

NB, for Don:
There is a sheet at the beginning of my copy listing copies supplied up to the day I ordered it from the Bodleian Library. Second on the list is Indiana University Libraries, Bloomington, IN 47405: 20 June 1989. (My copy was supplied on 10th January 1991.)

Tim


(The list of MIR related PhDs has been updated.)

More MIR PhDs

Kyogu Lee recently announced the defense of his PhD on the music-ir list. The title of his work is "A System for Chord Transcription, Key Extraction, and Cadence Recognition from Audio Using Hidden Markov Models".

Fabien Gouyon pointed me to Alex Loscos’ thesis which was completed recently. The title of his work is "Spectral Processing of the Singing Voice" (abstract and PDF).

Fabien also pointed me to the thesis of Álvaro Barbosa which was completed last year (and which I hadn’t included in the list of MIR PhDs yet). The title of his work is "Computer-Supported Cooperative Work for Music Applications" (PDF).

The music technology group (MTG) in Barcelona is currently by far the most productive MIR research group in terms of completed PhDs. A MTG specific PhD list can be found here.

Recent PhDs

Paul Brossier recently announced on the music-ir list that his PhD thesis is available for download (PDF). The topic of his thesis is "Automatic Annotation of Musical Audio for Interactive Applications" where he deals with implementations of algorithms that have very short latencies (i.e. they are very fast, and don't require the whole audio file as input to create useful output). Update: see also this post at nest @ The Echo Nest.

Pedro Cano recently successfully defended his thesis in Barcelona. The topic of his thesis is "Content-Based Audio Search from Fingerprinting to Semantic Audio Retrieval" (PDF). He covers a broad range of topics and discusses issues such as the semantic gap. Pedro is currently CTO of BMAT which is an amazing MIR related startup with an unbelievable amount of funding and excellent links to the impressive MIR research group at MTG.

The list of MIR PhDs has been updated.

Recent PhD

Tetsuro Kitahara completed his PhD in March. The title of his thesis is: "Computational Musical Instrument Recognition and its Application to Content-based Music Information Retrieval" (PDF). It's in English! (It's the first Japanese MIR related thesis written in English which I'm aware of.) He wrote it while working at Okuno's Laboratory at Kyoto University. He has now joined CrestMuse (an English version of the project web page is on its way) as postdoc at Kwansei Gakuin University (Katayose's Laboratory). I saw one of his demonstrations last year and was quite impressed.

(The list of MIR related PhD theses and dissertations has been updated.)

Recent PhDs

Two new PhD theses have been added to the list of MIR related PhDs recently.

Not too long ago Rui Pedro Paiva announced his completed thesis on the music-ir mailing list. The title of this thesis is "Melody Detection in Polyphonic Audio" written at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. One of his conclusions is that most of the research problems involved in melody detection are complex and still open. So I hope we will see many more PhDs on this topic.


The second PhD added to the list was written by Katsuhiko Kaji from Nagoya University, Japan. (Thanks to Masataka for pointing this out to me!) He wrote a thesis in Japanese with the English title: "A Study on a Universal Platform for Digital Content Annotation and its Application to Music Information Processing". I've seen some work on annotation in the MIR research community, but I don't remember seeing anyone trying to figure out a framework that can be applied to multimedia in general (including text, video, music and so on). If you're interested check the abstract and I'm sure Katsuhiko will be happy to answer any questions you might have.

There are at least two more PhDs from Japan that I hope to add to the list soon. If you know anyone that is about to finish, or has already finished their PhD related to MIR, please let me know.

Recent PhDs

5 PhDs were recently added to the list of MIR PhDs: Nicholas M. Collins, Sebastian Streich, Bee Suan Ong, Rainer Typke, and Johann-Markus Batke. Sebastian and Bee Suan have joined Yamaha in Japan. Rainer has joined the legendary intelligent music processing group at OFAI (who will be co-organizing ISMIR this year).

It seems like this year the number of completed PhDs could be higger than in any previous year. Other candidates in the queue include Enric Guaus, Roy Pierre, Kris West, Perfecto Herrera, Adam Berenzweig and many more.

BTW, Thomas Lidy recently completed his Master's thesis. The title is "Evaluation of New Audio Features and Their Utilization in Novel Music Retrieval Applications" (PDF). Thomas has been active in the MIR community (publishing at ISMIR and participating in MIREX for the last two years). He is a core team member of Andreas Rauber's group who will be co-organizing ISMIR this year.