Acoustic Scene Classification

This work was supported by the Centre for Digital Music Platform (grant EP/K009559/1) and a Leadership Fellowship (EP/G007144/1) both from the United Kingdom Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

Contribution to study and implementation of a bio-inspired perception system based on visual and auditory attention

The main goal of these researches is the design of one artificial perception system allowing to identify events or scenes in a complex environment. The work carried out during this thesis focused on the study and the conception of a bio-inspired perception system based on the both visual and auditory saliency. The main contributions of this thesis are auditory saliency with sound recognition and visual saliency with object recognition. The auditory saliency is computed by merging information from the both temporal and spectral signals with a saliency map of a spectrogram. The visual perception system is based on visual saliency and recognition of foreground object. In addition, the originality of the proposed approach is the possibility to do an evaluation of the coherence between visual and auditory observations using the obtained information from the features extracted from both visual and auditory patters. The experimental results have proven the interest of this method in the framework of scene identification in a complex environmentL'objectif principal de cette thèse porte sur la conception d'un système de perception artificiel permettant d'identifier des scènes ou évènements pertinents dans des environnements complexes. Les travaux réalisés ont permis d'étudier et de mettre en œuvre d'un système de perception bio-inspiré basé sur l'attention visuelle et auditive. Les principales contributions de cette thèse concernent la saillance auditive associée à une identification des sons et bruits environnementaux ainsi que la saillance visuelle associée à une reconnaissance d'objets pertinents. La saillance du signal sonore est calculée en fusionnant des informations extraites des représentations temporelles et spectrales du signal acoustique avec une carte de saillance visuelle du spectrogramme du signal concerné. Le système de perception visuelle est quant à lui composé de deux mécanismes distincts. Le premier se base sur des méthodes de saillance visuelle et le deuxième permet d'identifier l'objet en premier plan. D'autre part, l'originalité de notre approche est qu'elle permet d'évaluer la cohérence des observations en fusionnant les informations extraites des signaux auditifs et visuels perçus. Les résultats expérimentaux ont permis de confirmer l'intérêt des méthodes utilisées dans le cadre de l'identification de scènes pertinentes dans un environnement complex

Learning Audio Sequence Representations for Acoustic Event Classification

Acoustic Event Classification (AEC) has become a significant task for machines to perceive the surrounding auditory scene. However, extracting effective representations that capture the underlying characteristics of the acoustic events is still challenging. Previous methods mainly focused on designing the audio features in a 'hand-crafted' manner. Interestingly, data-learnt features have been recently reported to show better performance. Up to now, these were only considered on the frame-level. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised learning framework to learn a vector representation of an audio sequence for AEC. This framework consists of a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) encoder and a RNN decoder, which respectively transforms the variable-length audio sequence into a fixed-length vector and reconstructs the input sequence on the generated vector. After training the encoder-decoder, we feed the audio sequences to the encoder and then take the learnt vectors as the audio sequence representations. Compared with previous methods, the proposed method can not only deal with the problem of arbitrary-lengths of audio streams, but also learn the salient information of the sequence. Extensive evaluation on a large-size acoustic event database is performed, and the empirical results demonstrate that the learnt audio sequence representation yields a significant performance improvement by a large margin compared with other state-of-the-art hand-crafted sequence features for AEC

Audio Information Extraction

An overview of the work of the Laboratory for Recognition and Organization of Speech and Audio, Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University

Will the humble inherit the Earth? Towards a realistic politics of habitation

The related notions of habitation and habitability offer a very promising way for framing the conversation about the issues around which environmental political theory has gravitated from its inception: sustainability, environmental justice, preservation. However, the connection between the two must probably be revised in order to produce an ideal of habitation that is useful in the current sociopolitical context. This paper seeks to clarify their mutual relations and explores the way for the politicization of habitation. Underlining the role of nonintentional actions in the past history of habitation, it will argue that, in order to politicize habitation, the latter must be made salient -so that citizens realize that the socionatural relation is not that 'natural'. Ernesto Laclau's notion of the political as an uncovering of contingencies may be useful, while the Lacanian notion of fantasy may be used to explain the gap between current (instrumental) modes of habitation and pervasive (Arcadian) ideals of it. As to how can the relation between habitation and habitability be effectively politicized, this paper will argue that it is the political, rather than politics, what offers a most promising path for re-imagining habitation in our complex and ambivalent societies. Ecological citizenship and newly created spaces for nature are sketched as strategies for politicizing habitation. Bioregionalism is recovered as a radical politics of habitation whose flaws must be avoided if habitation is to be reframed in a mostly urban, hypertechnological world. In this regard, the paper also develops a particular narrative for a reframed habitation, a 'clever adaptation' understood as a regulatory ideal towards which different actions and discourses can be directed.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec