💼 I am a senior scientist and principal investigator at Fraunhofer IDMT with a focus on applied research in music information retrieval & machine listening.

🎓 I’m currently working on my habilitation Computational Analysis of Sounds and Music at the TU Ilmenau.

🔬 In my research, I combine techniques from machine learning / deep learning and audio signal processing. I mainly focus on two application scenarios:

• Environmental Sound Analysis - Here, I work mostly on sound event detection, sound polyphony estimation, acoustic scene classification, and applications for urban sound monitoring and bioacoustic research.

• Music Information Retrieval - Here, I’m mostly interested in automatic music transcription and instrument recognition.

👨‍🏫 Teaching

As a central part of my habilitation, I’m active in university teaching:

• Computational Analysis of Sound and Music - Full semester lecture (English) at TU Ilmenau in the summer semester 2024, which is covering fundamentals in audio signal processing and machine/deep learning, application scenarios in music information retrieval and environmental sound analysis, as well as a practical research project. Check out the Lecture Page to follow along and access the lecture slides and Jupyter notebooks.

• Machine Listening for Music and Sound Analysis - 6-part lecture (English) on audio signal processing & deep learning applied for music information retrieval (MIR) and environmental sound analysis (ESA). The lecture took place for the fifth time in the winter semester 2023/2024 at the TU Ilmenau. The lecture & seminar material can be found on the Lecture Page.

• KI-gestützte Audioanalyse von Musik und Soundscapes - Bi-weekly seminar (German) in the winter semester 2022/2023 at the HfM Weimar in cooperation with Prof. Martin Pfleiderer. The lecture material can be found on the Lecture Page.

🎸 🥁 🎧 Music

I have a big passion for playing & teaching music (bass guitar & percussion).

• Groovecell - Online Learning for Bass and Drums
  • Youtube Channel
• LMNT7 - Progressive Rock Band (Ilmenau)
  • BandCamp

🔔 News

• 24.09.2024: I gave an introduction lecture entitled Computational Audio Analysis at the Master Science Camp “Biodiversitätsmonitoring – komplexe Signalanalyse und KI Anwendungen zur Vogelstimmenerkennung” at the TU Ilmenau yesterday.

• 21.09.2024: I will organize a special session entitled Acoustic Scene Analysis using Artificial Intelligence at the DAS/DAGA 2025 - 51st Annual Meeting on Acoustics in Copenhagen, Denmark from March 17-20 2025 together with Dr. Toni Heittola.

• 20./21.03.2024: I co-organized a structured session entitled Sound Analysis for Music and Audio Signals at the DAGA 2024 together with Prof. Meinard Müller and Prof. Stefan Balke. We had 15 great presentations covering topics from music analysis, speech processing, as well as environmental sound analysis.

• 12.12.2023: I’m happy to share that our journal article Human and Machine Performance in Counting Sound Classes in Single-Channel Soundscapes has been published in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society (JAES). This has been a great collaboration with my IDMT colleagues Asad Ullah, Sascha Grollmisch and Sebastian Ziegler.

• 06.12.2023: I was invited by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Anna Kruspe to give two guest lectures on Environmental Sound Analysis at the Technische Hochschule Nürnberg Georg Simon Ohm.

• 10.10.2023: I will co-organize a special session entitled Machine Learning for Acoustic Scene Understanding with Prof. Sebastian Stober at the Inter-Noise 2024

• 11.07.2023: I’m happy to share that our article How Robust are Audio Embeddings for Polyphonic Sound Event Tagging? was published in the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10178070). This has been a great colaboration with Sascha Grollmisch and Prof. Meinard Müller

• 22.09.2022: I co-organized a structured session entitled Sound Analysis for Music and Audio Signals (Details) at the DAGA 2023 together with Prof. Meinard Müller and Prof. Sebastian Stober

• 20.07.2022: I’m honored to be invited to be part of the editorial board of the EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing

• 14.07.2022: Our ISMIR paper Multi-pitch Estimation meets Microphone Mismatch: Applicability of Domain Adaptation (co-authored with Franca Bittner, Marcel Gonzales, Maike Richter, and Hanna Lukashevich) was accepted!

• 19.05.2022: I gave a talk at the AES Europe Spring Convention on Classifying Sounds in Polyphonic Urban Sound Scenes, where I introduced the Urban Sound Monitoring (USM) dataset

• 27.04.2022: I gave a presentation entitled “Erkennung akustischer Quellen in komplexen Szenarien” (in German) at the 17. Jenaer Akustik-Tag.

• Published a novel version of the Urban Sound Monitoring (USM) dataset for sound event tagging in polyphonic soundscapes.

• Small dataset published for piano multipitch estimation evaluation: PIANO-AUG - Piano Multipitch Estimation with Augmentation Dataset

• Paper accepted for the AES Europe Spring 2022 (AES’s 152nd convention): “Classifying Sounds in Polyphonic Urban Sound Scenes”

• Abstract accepted at the DMRN+16 Digital Music Research Network One-day Workshop 2021: A Benchmark Dataset to Study Microphone Mismatch Conditions for Piano Multipitch Estimation on Mobile Devices (collaboration with Franca Bittner, Maike Richter, Marcel Gonzalez, and Hanna Lukashevich)

• Best paper award at the CMMR 2021 for our paper “Deep Learning-Based Music Instrument Recognition: Exploring Learned Feature Representations” (Michael Taenzer, Stylianos I. Mimilakis and Jakob Abeßer): Twitter announcement

• Two abstracts submitted to DAGA 2022: Analyzing Bird and Bat Activity in Agricultural Environments using AI-driven Audio Monitoring (collaboration with Prof. Christoph Scherber, Dr. Svenja Bänsch, Xiaoyi Wang, and Hanna Lukashevich) and Construction-sAIt: Multi-modal AI-driven technologies for construction site monitoring (collaboration with Dr. Alexander Loos and Prachi Sharma)

• New pre-print published: Towards Audio Domain Adaptation for Acoustic Scene Classification using Disentanglement Learning (collaboration with Prof. Meinard Müller)

• I’m a guest editor for the EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing (JASM) call: Recent advances in computational sound scene analysis (together with Emmanouil Benetos, Annamaria Mesaros, Wenwu Wang)

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