Doctoral Award of the Staedtler Foundation for former AudioLabs researcher
17.10.2019 Link
Dr. Christian Dittmar, group leader at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS, was honored by the Staedtler Foundation for his outstanding doctoral achievement. His dissertation, written at the International Audio Laboratories Erlangen, is entitled "Source separation and restoration of drum sounds in music recordings". The highly endowed doctoral award was presented in a festive setting on 17 October 2019 in Nuremberg. The still young research field of automated music processing, in which Mr. Dittmar's dissertation is located, deals with the development of computer-based methods for the analysis, search and modification of music in all its different forms. With his work, Mr. Dittmar pursued the goal of reconstructing the drum tracks from music recordings by means of source separation as if they had been recorded individually. Mr. Dittmar has developed new methods to extract perceptually convincing source signals without introducing audible artifacts. In addition to technical contributions, the dissertation also impresses with its interdisciplinarity. The methods developed are used, among other things, for the computer-aided analysis of microrhythms in jazz. By researching novel algorithms in concrete application scenarios, this work provides fundamental research contributions whose relevance goes far beyond music processing. For 21 years now, the Staedtler Foundation has been honoring young scientists from the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) for their outstanding dissertations. Each year, ten doctoral candidates are awarded with prize money of 3,500 Euro each. The award ceremony takes place at the headquarters of the Staedtler Group in Nuremberg. The award winners of all faculties are nominated by their respective faculties.
