DIGITALAUDIO challenges and possibili es Sound is a cri cal content and experience element in digital media technology. The consump on of audio through online streaming, podcasts and social network pla orms has never been larger. The consequence is that the roles of ar st, producers, right owners, libraries, broadcasters, music and technology companies are in a transforma onal phase. However, this creates a great poten al for new products and services for naviga on, organiza on and consump on of audio based on user s needs and context. Further, it provides new opportuni es for communica on, interac on, enrichment and access to cultural heritage. A cross-disciplinary effort between creative, cultural, technological researchers and businesses is required to solve the challenges and release the potential. Meet leading players in the field, learn about the challenges and possibili es, and get up to date on state of the art solu ons, running projects and ini a ves PRACTICAL INFORMATION TIME: FRIDAY JUNE 21 2013-09.00 16.30 PLACE: PRICE: REGISTRATION: BELLA SKY HOTEL, CENTER BOULEVARD 5, DK 2300 COPENHAGEN S FREE OF CHARGE BUT NO-SHOW FEE OF 600 DKK EMAIL TO REEN@DTU.DK Arranged by In collabora on with
PROGRAM 08:45 Arrival, registration and coffee 09:00 Welcome Jan Larsen, coordinator of CoSound and director of Danish Sound Innovation Network 09:10 Changing Practices of Production, Distribution and Communication in the Digital Music Industry Rasmus Rex Pedersen, Roskilde University 09:50 WiMP HiFi - Great Sound is Good Business Pål Bråtelund, Wimp 2 10:30 Break Coffee and networking 10:45 Making Sense of Sounds Mark Plumbley, Queen Mary University of London 11:25 Casual Interaction With Computers Roderick Murray-Smith, University of Glasgow 12:05 Plenary debate on engaging users in digital music consumption Jan Larsen will facilitate the debate 12:30 Lunch 13:15 The Digital Dilemma: Big Data s Interdisciplinary Challenge Elizabeth Cohen, Cohen Acoustical and The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 14:00 Audio Culture Researcher Requirements, Metadata Design and Potentials of Automated Feature Extraction Birger Larsen, Royal School of Library and Information Science 14:40 Break Coffee and networking 14:55 How audiences and machines can help publish large archives Mark Flashman, BBC Research and Development 15:40 Break Coffee and networking 15:50 Panel discussion The presenters will discuss the themes of today and end up with a short list of recommendations for future actions. Jan Larsen will facilitate the discussion 16:30 Wrap-up
SPEAKERS RASMUS REX PEDERSEN, UNIVERSITY OF ROSKILDE Changing Practices of Production, Distribution and Communication in the Digital Music Industry: The digitization of the music industry has profoundly changed the way music is produced, distributed and marketed. While much attention has been given to the impact of piracy, less attention has been given to the institutional changes that have followed. This presentation will explore ways in which digitization of the music industry has led to new practices for artists, music companies and audiences. These changes do not present themselves as a revolution but rather as incremental change. 3 The new audience practice of gaining access to music on the Internet, often for free and illegally, has decreased recorded music s centrality in the music industry value chain. Therefore record companies are no longer to the same extent key gatekeepers in the music market, and furthermore their decreasing revenue from music sales have caused them to shift risk onto artist. In turn, artists are increasingly expected to act as entrepreneurs with responsibility for development of their artistic and commercial value and deliver a near-finished product to the record company. Moreover, competition between musicians has increased because of lowered entrance barriers to production and distribution of music, resulting in a demand to differentiate oneself as an artist for example through communicating more directly with fans in social media, and producing a variety of media content. In line with these changes, I will suggest emerging tendencies in the music industry for further exploration. Bio: Rasmus is a PhD Fellow at Roskilde University, studying musicians conditions in the digital media ecology. He is also Teaching Assistant Professor in Music Management at Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen. PhD Fellow Department of Communication, Business and Information Technologies House 42-2.16 Universitetsvej 1, P.O. Box 260 DK-4000 Roskilde Denmark Tel: (+45) 2238 2229 Email: rasmusr@ruc.dk WiMP HiFi - Great Sound is Good Business: After a decade of lossy compression, the capabilities for a modern signal chain of lossless audio is finally here. Scandinavian households have enough bandwidth, the playback devices are capable and the business models are in place. As we are revving up the engines for our WiMP HiFi product, there are many aspects that are interesting to the future of sound: The PÅL BRÅTELUND, WIMP
troubles and joys of creating a lossless value chain from sourcing to playback in all sorts of devices and listening situations, the ups and downs of loudness normalization, listening as a primary activity, listening as a secondary activity and the pragmatism of what is good enough sound for the listener in a given situation. WiMP HiFi has been in beta for a few months so join in for some insights of lossless streaming. Bio: Pål Bråtelund is a trained music producer from Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. In parallel with a life as a record producer and musician he has worked within the Schibsted Media Group as a project manager for online services in the media houses and agile work processes. He joined WiMP last year and his main focus is optimizing the listening experience on all devices ranging from white ear buds to hi-fi systems. Product Developer pal.bratelund@wimpmusic.com Tel: +47 99218310 4 MARK PLUMBLEY, QUEEN MARY UNIVERSITY OF LONDON Making Sense of Sounds: Sound and music surrounds us all the time. Often we hear all this without really noticing: it just forms part of the background to our lives. The human ability to listen to sounds is something that is very hard for computers; but we are now beginning to build sound processing methods that can help us. In this talk I will discuss some of these techniques that can separate out different sound sources from a mixture, follow the notes and the beats in a piece of music, or show us the sound in new visual ways. These "machine listening" algorithms offer the potential to make sense of the huge amount of sound and music in our digital world: helping us to analyze sounds like heartbeats or birdsong, find the music we want in huge collections of music tracks, or to create music in new ways. Bio: Prof. Mark Plumbley is Director of the Centre for Digital Music (C4DM) at Queen Mary University of London. His research interests include the analysis of audio and music signals, including beat tracking, automatic music transcription and source separation, using techniques such as information theory and sparse representations. He is Principal Investigator on several current EPSRC grants, including "Sustainable Software for Digital Music and Audio Research" and a Platform Grant, and he holds an EPSRC Leadership Fellowship. He leads the UK Digital Music Research Network and is a member of the IEEE Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing Technical Committee. Contact Director of Centre for Digital Music Professor of Machine Learning and Signal Processing Tel: +44 20 7882 7518 Email: mark.plumbley@eecs.qmul.ac.uk
RODERICK MURRAY-SMITH, UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW Casual Interaction With Computers: We describe the focused casual continuum, a framework for describing interaction techniques according to the degree to which they allow users to adapt how much attention and effort they choose to invest in an interaction conditioned on their current situation. Casual interactions are particularly appropriate in scenarios where full engagement with devices is frowned upon socially, is unsafe, physically challenging or too mentally taxing. In larger media collections some level of automation in content retrieval becomes essential. However, at times people want to engage deeply with interactions with as little automation between them and the content as possible. In casual search scenarios, users have an ill-defined information need and it is not clear how to determine relevance. We present two novel music interaction systems developed for casual exploratory search using query likelihood modelling. 5 Bio: Professor Roderick Murray-Smith works in the overlap between machine learning, interaction design and control theory. He is a Professor of Computing Science in the University of Glasgow, where he runs the Dynamics, Inference and Interaction research group. Prior to this he held positions at the Hamilton Institute, The Technical University of Denmark, M.I.T., Daimler-Benz Research and Nokia. He is Director of SICSA, the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance. School of Computing Science, Glasgow University Glasgow G12 8QQ Scotland Tel: +44 141 330 4984 E-mail: rod@dcs.gla.ac.uk ELIZABETH COHEN, COHEN ACOUSTICAL AND ACADEMY OF MOTION PICTURE ARTS AND SCIENCES The Digital Dilemma: Big Data s Interdisciplinary Challenge: This talk discusses the curatorial tests archivists face. The amount of data generated on the Internet every minute poses one aspect of this. Every minute YouTube users upload 48 hours of video, Facebook users share 684,478 pieces of content, Instagram users share 3,600 new photos, and Tumblr sees 27,778 new posts published. Big Data impacts our daily lives as well as our professional audio community. In film production digital content capture has encouraged longer shooting times, movie projects now typically create multiple Petabytes of raw content. Studios have switched to digital prints. Laboratories that processed celluloid are closing or have shut down. Kodak is in bankruptcy proceedings and Fuji is no longer manufacturing film stock. Digital storage and reliability is borderline ephemeral. Hardware and software are constantly upgraded and the only guarantee a consumer/user has is the assuredness that technological obsolescence is a given. In cinema, the industry has rapidly moved from 2k to 4k and is heading towards formats that offer even greater amounts of visual
information which to date has engendered a pattern of increasing preservation costs. Digital Archiving has proven both difficult and expensive. It requires highly skilled personnel trained in both art and science. The Sound Preservation Board of the Library of Congress has recently called for an interdisciplinary approach to sound preservation. As the 2012 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science's reported: " organizations dealing with digital systems and data collection face the same problem: they do not have an operationally and economically sustainable means to maintain long-term access to their materials. The issue is what will happen to our cultural heritage? As reported by the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Digital Preservation, ensuring that valued digital information will be accessible not just today, but in the future requires solutions that are at least as much economic and social as technical. The question of how to dependably and efficiently archive and access massive amounts of audio-visual information in the long term is discussed as an issue for not just government and scientific communities but one that is paramount for preserving our audiovisual heritage. 6 Bio: Elizabeth Cohen founded Cohen Acoustical in 1982. Her clients have included The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, CBS, Digital Theater Systems, Dolby Labs, Fraunhofer Institute, Grateful Dead Productions, The Los Angeles Philharmonic, The Walt Disney Company, Sony, Universal Studios and numerous other arts and entertainment organizations. As part of the CineGrid interdisciplinary community, Cohen's current work is focused on the research, development and demonstration of networked collaborative tools to enable the production, use and exchange of very high-quality digital media over photonic networks. A past president and fellow of the Audio Engineering Society, Cohen is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), and serves on the AMPAS Digital Motion Picture Archive Committee. She served as the Academy representative to the Blue Ribbon Panel on Economically Sustainable Digital Preservation. She has also served on the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences Committee on Archiving and Preservation. In 1993 and 1994, Cohen was a Science and Engineering fellow to the White House Economic Council, where she was responsible for Arts and Information Infrastructure Initiatives. Cohen received her M.S. degree in electrical Engineering and Ph. D. in Acoustics from Stanford University. Cohen Acoustical and Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 1313 Vine Street Hollywood, California 90028 Tel: 323-817-4171 BIRGER LARSEN, ROYAL SCHOOL OF LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE Audio Culture Researcher Requirements, Metadata Design and Potentials of Automated Feature Extraction: Digitised cultural heritage objects hold great potential for research in particular in the Humanities. In this talk we present results from a study of the requirements of audio culture researchers in relation to their needs for search and annotation in large audio repositories. We also present the metadata scheme designed for encompassing both original archive metadata and researcher annotations, and reflect on the potential of automated feature extraction.
Bio: Birger Larsen is Associate Professor and leader of the research group on Information Systems and Interaction Design at the Royal School of Library and Information Science, in Copenhagen, Denmark. He has a passion for research that involves the activities, processes and experiences arising in the meeting between users, information, and information systems in a given context - with the goal of optimising these to empower users in their task and problem solving. His main research interests include Information Retrieval (IR), structured documents in IR, XML IR and user interaction, exploiting context in IR, Informetrics/Bibliometrics, citation analysis and quantitative research evaluation. He is involved in a number of research projects on information retrieval and information access to large repositories of cultural heritage and scientific documents. Associate Professor, Information Systems and Interaction Design Royal School of Library and Information Science Birketinget 6, DK-2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark Tel. +45 3258 6066 / +45 32341520 Email: blar@iva.dk 7 MARK FLASHMAN, BBC Talk - How audiences and machines can help publish large archives: The World Service Radio Archive prototype website includes around 50,000 English-language programmes from the BBC audio archive. The programmes have all been categorised by machine using innovative data extraction techniques, and metadata is further improved by the ways users interact with the site. A combination of automation and crowd-sourcing has dramatically reduced the amount of time required to publish this rich archive online. Bio: Until recently Mark was the Operations Manager at the BBC World Service, responsible for the delivery and management of English audio content and associated data to a weekly audience of over 38 million around the world through multiple broadcast channels and IP platforms. He started his BBC career in the Commercial Recordings Library and has since worked in various roles in programme making, marketing and business development. He has consistently used technology in innovative ways to improve the way programmes are produced, promoted and distributed, implementing systems to improve the management, broadcast and reporting of content. Mark initially focused on music - producing music radio shows and commissioning signature tunes/music branding, before becoming Operations Manager where he played a leading part in the digitisation of broadcast operations, music reporting, and programme archiving. This led to his role as Search Engine Optimisation consultant in which he researched, wrote and introduced the SEO policy for the BBC foreign language teams. He also played key roles in the introduction, management and development of the first digital programme archive, and auto-recognition music reporting system at the BBC. He has recently moved to the BBC's Internet Research and Future Services team where he is exploring ways to unlock archives using automatically generated and crowd-sourced metadata.
BBC Research and Development Media Centre 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TQ Tel: 020 8743 8000 tel.: +44 (0)7739 300 304 Email: mark.flashman@bbc.co.uk JAN LARSEN, TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY OF DENMARK 8 Bio: Jan is Associate Professor of Digital Signal Processing at Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, DTU. He has authored and co-authored more than 125 papers and book chapters within the areas of nonlinear statistical signal processing, machine learning, neural networks and datamining with applications to biomedicine, monitoring systems, multimedia, audio, and webmining. According to Google Scholar the no. of citations is 2533, h-index is 28 and i-10 index 65 as of 27.03.2013. Currently he coordinates the strategic research project CoSound (2012-2015) focused on methods and tools for an augmented audio experience and making the information actionable, i.e., enable users to interpret, organize, analyze, share, co-create, and facilitate story-telling and audio management. He is also director of the Danish Sound Innovation Network. Director of Danish Sound Innovation Network, Associate Professor, Ph.D. Technical University of Denmark Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science Richard Petersens Plads, Building 321 DK-2800 Kongens Lyngby, Denmark Tel: (+45) 45 25 39 23 Mobile: (+45) 22 43 00 25 Email: janla@dtu.dk