Ircam in Quaero Project: three researcher positions

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Please send an application letter together with your resume, a photo and any suitable information addressing the above issues preferably by email to: peeters@ircam.fr with cc to vinet@ircam.fr, rod@ircam.fr.

THE POSITIONS:

Introduction to IRCAM

IRCAM is a leading non-profit organization associated to Centre Pompidou, dedicated to music production, R&D and education in acoustics and music. It hosts composers, researchers and students from many countries cooperating in contemporary music production, scientific and applied research. The main topics addressed in its R&D department include acoustics, audio signal processing, computer music, interaction technologies, musicology. Ircam is located in the center of Paris near the Centre Pompidou, at 1, Place Igor Stravinsky 75004 Paris.

Introduction to Quaero project

Quaero is a 200 M Euros collaborative research and development program focusing on the areas of automatic extraction of information, analysis, classification and usage of digital multimedia content for professionals and consumers. The research work shall concentrate on managing virtually unlimited quantities of multimedia and multilingual information, including text, speech, music, image and video.

Five main application areas have been identified by the partners:

1. multimedia internet search
2. enhanced access services to audiovisual content on portals
3. personalized video selection and
4. professional audiovisual asset
5. digitalization and enrichment of library content, audiovisual cultural heritage and scientific

The Quaero consortium was created to meet new multimedia content analysis requirements for consumers and professionals, faced with the explosion of accessible digital information and the proliferation of access means (PC, TV, handheld devices). More information can be found at www.quaero.org.

Role of Ircam in Quaero Project

In the Quaero project, Ircam is in charge of the coordination of audio/music indexing research and of development of music-audio indexing technology: music content-description (tempo, rhythm, key, chord, singing-voice, and instrumentation description), automatic indexing (music genre/style, mood), music similarity, music audio summary, chorus detection. A specificity of the project is the creation of a large-music-audio corpus in order to train and validate all the algorithms developed during the project.

Position framework

Three researcher positions are available each for a duration (each) of 18 months.

Position description

Researchers would be in charge of the development of the technologies related to: -

1. music-audio content description/ content-extraction: tempo and beat/measure position estimation, key/mode, chord progression, instrument/drum identification, singing voice location, voice description
2. music automatic indexing into music genre, music mood
3. music similarity: especially on large-scale databases
4. music structure discovery, automatic music audio summary generation, chorus location

Researcher will also collaborate with the evaluation team who evaluate algorithms performances and with the developer team.

Required profile

• Very high skills in audio signal processing (spectral analysis, audio-feature extraction, parameter estimation)
• High skill in audio indexing and data mining (statistical modelling, automatic feature selection algorithm, …)
• High-skill in large-database search algorithms
• Good knowledge of Linux, Windows, MAC-OS environments
• High-skill in Matlab programming, skills in C/C++ programming
• High productivity, methodical work, excellent programming style.

Salary

According to background and experience

For more information visit www.quaero.org.

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