Music and Audition at NIPS (1st day at Vail)

[weigend@sabai.cs.colorado.edu]

	       Call for abstracts and announcement:

NIPS workshop: Connectionism for Music and Audition

	 Date: December 3 (this is the first of the two Vail days)

   Organizers: Dick Duda                     Andreas Weigend
	       San Jose State University     University of Colorado at Boulder
	       duda at sri.com		     weigend at cs.colorado.edu

   If you are interested in presenting at this NIPS workshop in Vail,
   please send an abstract to both organizers **before November 1st**. 
   We will review the abstracts and then decide on the schedule. 
   We also invite suggestions for further topics of discussion.
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CONTENTS:
	    While speech and language dominate our auditory experience, the
human auditory system is constantly processing a much broader world of sound
events. Some of the most fundamental questions concerning music and general
sound perception are still largely unanswered; the range extends from the
separation and organization of sound streams to the problem of a hierarchy
of time scales. In this workshop, we want to explores the development and
application of connectionist methods to music and audition.

At this NIPS workshop, we plan to address both topics of music and audition.

	    Topic 1: Music

In recent years, NIPS has seen (and heard) neural networks generate tunes
and harmonize chorales.  With a large amount of music becoming available
in computer-readable form, real data can be used to build connectionist
models.  The time has come to think about questions, tasks, goals in areas
ranging from connectionist modeling of expectations to automated music
analysis and composition.
One feature of music that makes it interesting to model is the hierarchy
of time scales involved. Which connectionist architectures are suited for
several order of magnitude in time? How can temporal information important
for music be integrated efficiently?  Particular attention will be paid to
the advantages of different type of recurrent networks, and to architectures
that try to incorporate invariances of the problem domain (e.g., TDNN).

	    Topic 2: Audition

While the human auditory system is exquisitely sensitive to speech and
music, it is based on a mammalian auditory system that is equally adept
at solving more fundamental tasks.  These tasks include (a) separating
multiple sound sources, (b) localizing the sources in space and time, 
(c) characterizing the sources in terms of identifying qualities such as
pitch and timbre, (d) suppressing the effects of early reflections and
room reverberation, and (e) characterizing the acoustic environment.  To
date, most of the work on auditory scene analysis has focussed on the
auditory periphery, as represented by cochlear models and networks for
detecting onsets, harmonicity, modulation, and interaural time and
intensity differences.

The major unanswered questions concern the nature of structures and
processes that can integrate this information into stable and valid
percepts.  How should different sound objects be represented in a
connectionist architecture? What will stabilize these representations as
the sources and the listener move? How will these representations support
other tasks? What is the role of expectations or other forms of
bi-directional information flow? How can cross-modal information be
included? What is the role of world constraints and environmental
factors, and how are they reflected in the network architecture?
Finally, what is a scientifically appropriate methodology for evaluating
the performance of proposed connectionist solutions to these problems?
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General NIPS information and registration:
			     		    An electronic copy of the
1993 NIPS registration brochure is available in postscript format via
anonymous ftp at helper.systems.caltech.edu in
/pub/nips/NIPS_93_brochure.ps.Z.

For a hardcopy of the brochure, you can write to nips93 at systems.caltech.edu or
NIPS Foundation
P.O. Box 60035
Pasadena, CA 91116-6035
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