Discipline: Computer Sciences & Information Management
Subcategory: STEM Research
- Lincoln University
Computational Research on Music & Audio (CRoMA) was launched at Lincoln University in 2015 with the support of the National Science Foundation through an HBCU-UP award. The purpose of this project is to establish a research program to study aspects and applications of computational audio signal processing. This effort has an interdisciplinary focus, drawing from disciplines such as computer science, engineering, mathematics, psychology, biology, and music. Further, the project aims to specifically include undergraduate students in the research activities. In year three, the project has: a) directly supported five undergraduate students and one graduate student as research assistants, b) supported summer salary and a course release to allow the PI to engage in research activities, c) fostered interdisciplinary collaborations between researchers in the region and beyond, and d) enabled presentation of work by students and the PI at national and international conferences. One such presentation, ‘Musical Instrument Classification Utilizing a Neural Network’, earned a first-place award at the 2017 Emerging Researchers National Conference in STEM in the undergraduate computer science category. Research continues to incorporate attention into computational auditory scene analysis (CASA) using ‘focal templates’, as presented at the 2017 IEEE Sensors Applications Symposium and the 2017 Meeting of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition. Recent research has focused on identification of pollinators in the environment from field audio. Training and recruitment of new students to the CRoMA Team of Interdisciplinary Collaborators (CRoMA-TIC) will be facilitated by the development of a topics class (to be offered Spring 2018) on Machine Learning and Signal Processing, which will target students from computer science and other disciplines (including biology), giving special attention to problems in computational bioacoustics. A foundation for CRoMA has been established through this project, and the PI is looking for opportunities to sustain this effort through forged collaborations and other sources of support.
Funder Acknowledgement(s): National Science Foundation, Award #1410586
Faculty Advisor: None Listed,