ECS729 in Spring 2017 is a module on Music and Speech Processing taught by Professor Elaine Chew in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London.  The module is designed for masters students in the school's Digital Music Processing MSc Course and in the Digital Signal Processing MSc Course, as well as third (final) year undergraduates.  This is the website for the module for Spring 2017. 

This module introduces students to research in expressive music performance in computational musicology and spoken language in computational linguistics through a problem based learning approach. Material covered includes techniques for analysing performed music and spoken language, methods for developing music and speech technologies, and applications of these technologies. Specific topics include timing, loudness, intonation, spectral features, and prosody and music expression modeling.

The module adopts a highly interactive hands-on (learning-by-doing and learning-by-example) approach. Students are required to actively contribute to class through presentations of and discussions on current scientific articles, and by designing and carrying out their own final project.

The module is based 100% on coursework, which consists of paper presentation(s), practical assignments, in-class participation, and a project (to be partitioned into four parts consisting of initial proposal, literature review and data collection, preliminary analytical results of prototype system, and a final project submission and presentation).

The module is adaptive and based on problem-driven learning. The detailed agenda is shaped collaboratively in class early in the semester. This year, the remit of musical expression will be expanded to include music structure and music generation. See the links below for examples of past projects:

• • 2014: https://sites.google.com/site/ecs729spr2014/projects

  • 2015: https://sites.google.com/site/ecs729spr2015/projects

  • 2016: https://sites.google.com/site/qmulecs729spr2016/projects

The class sessions take place Mondays 9-12 in Frances House's common room; the first class meets Monday, 9 Jan 2017. The labs are due to take place 9-11 on Thursdays in ITL whenever there are assignments due.

EC. 5 January 2017.