Former AudioLabs colleague honored with Bavarian Culture Prize
12.12.2024
Bayernwerk honors PhD Thesis of Dr. Michael Krause from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. On 14 November 2024, Bayernwerk AG (Bayernwerk), in close partnership with the Bavarian State Ministry of Sciences and the Arts, honored the winners of the Bavarian Culture Prize for the 20th time. At the event in Munich, Michael Krause was honored in the Science category. He received the award for his dissertation, titled "Activity Detection for Sound Events in Orchestral Music Recordings" which he wrote as PhD Student at the AudioLabs.
How computers can learn to understand music
Today, systems based on artificial intelligence (AI) can recognize objects in photos, translate text, understand spoken language, and hold conversations with people. "However, the machine processing of music is often neglected," says Michael Krause. In his doctoral thesis, supervised by the AudioLabs professor Meinard Müller, he developed AI methods for automatic activity recognition of sound events in music recordings. This enables computers to "learn" to recognize certain musical motifs, instruments or vocals in pieces that are new to the computer. Michael has focused on orchestral and opera music, with an emphasis on complex compositions characterized by rich timbres and a high degree of polyphony. A special focus was the opera cycle "Der Ring des Nibelungen" by Richard Wagner. In this cycle, leitmotifs form a particularly important group of sound events. In an interdisciplinary cooperation with musicologists, he developed AI-based methods for the automatic recognition of leitmotifs in opera recordings. The results of Michael Krause's dissertation have been published in prestigious journals. "As an extremely complex modality, music is particularly suitable for investigating the strengths and weaknesses of modern AI methods. My work has led to a better understanding of both the techniques used and the musical structures studied," says Michael Krause.
Michael Krause was PhD student at the AudioLabs from 2019 to 2023. If you would like to learn more about his research, visit his website including a link to his award-winning PhD thesis.