The SoundSoftware 2012 Workshop

The SoundSoftware 2012 Workshop yesterday was a successful event, bringing together talks on software development and experience from the audio and music research field with best practice ideas from around the research world.

Above: David Gavaghan and Mark Plumbley

The programme opened with a questioning keynote from Cameron Neylon on the future of science and its progression from a craft-and-guild model to an integrated mesh of services.

We then had a sequence of talks on concrete software development practice from Paul Walmsley of Sibelius and David Gavaghan from Oxford University, both major proponents of unit testing and a test-first approach, as well as an outline of the Sound Software project's findings in the audio and music research field from Chris Cannam.

Following lunch and a tour of the Centre for Digital Music's facilities at Queen Mary, the next session included a pair of informative talks about the history and maintenance of the Auditory Image Model software from Roy Patterson and Thomas Walters with further ideas for managing collaborative development.

Bob L Sturm then gave a lively talk about the problems inherent in managing substantial databases of musical "ground truth" and their particular manifestation in a widely-used genre-classification data set. Also related to data was Steve Welburn's outline of the Centre for Digital Music's data management pilot project and its context in data lifecycles and the evolving requirements of funding bodies.

The final session focused on outreach and engagement, starting with an overview of the Is Recording Engineering? project from Jez Wells which uses software distribution as a way of engaging with a wider audience.

David De Roure spoke about reconstruction as a vital activity in the research world (and its place amongst other words beginning with R). Finally, a talk from Steve Crouch outlining the goals and work of the Software Sustainability Institute was followed by Mahendra Mahey discussing how to stimulate and involve "connected developers" in a horizontal structure across institutions and disciplines, through Dev8D and other DevCSI initiatives.

We will be updating this site with slides and media from the event during this week, so stand by. You might also like to check out the #ssww2012 Twitter hashtag for remarks from the attendees during the day!

Tweets by @soundsoftwareuk

Recent notes

MLSP Prizes for Reproducibility: Winners announced!

Announcing the winners of the MLSP 2014 and SoundSoftware.ac.uk Prizes for Reproducibility in Signal Processing, organised by SoundSoftware.ac.uk in conjuction with the IEEE Signal Processing Society for the 2014 IEEE International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing.

SoundSoftware 2014: Videos now available!

The SoundSoftware 2014 workshop, our third annual workshop on software and data in audio and music research, was just as enjoyable as the previous two. Because so much research in this field ends up being expressed through software, a software workshop turns out to be all about the means by which research becomes useful and relevant to people other than the original researchers—fertile ground for interesting and thought-provoking talks.

The workshop videos are now available online at http://soundsoftware.ac.uk/soundsoftware2014, so if you weren't able to make it in person, catch up here!

Our third annual one-day workshop on Software and Data for Audio and Music Research takes place on the 8th of July 2014 at Queen Mary, University of London. The workshop includes talks on issues such as robust software development for audio and music research, reproducible research in general, management of research data, and open access. Read more here, clear your calendar, and register now!