Richard Smith
Smith Watkins Ltd
Good Vibrations! The Physics of Brass Instrument Design
A talk with demonstrations showing how scientific methods can help the
design of musical instruments and at the same time demolish some of
the myths perpetuated by musicians.
Of particular interest speech researchers interested in vocal tract
and oral cavity modelling, who would like to see how their assumptions
and models compare to those used in instrument design. Richard is
currently working on ideas about how instrument acoustics interact
with the oral cavity, and how ultra-high notes can be produced. His
company designed the custom instruments used at the recent Royal
Wedding and Royal Jubilee.
More details at,
http://www.smithwatkins.com/ -- see the "library" section for
publications and scientific overview articles.
'Unconventional, maybe; eccentric, perhaps; but then few scientists in
their field can claim to have charted new territories of knowledge
like Richard Smith.'--Yorkshire Post
Richard Smith wrote a doctoral
thesis on trumpet acoustics before joining Boosey and Hawkes, where he
worked for 12 years as chief designer and technical manager
responsible for the world famous Besson brass range, including the
original trumpets used by Derek Watkins and John Wallace, trombones
for Roy Williams and Don Lusher, and the cornets used by most brass
and military bands. Richard’s research work into acoustics, testing
and development of brass instruments has been widely publicised in the
scientific literature and on TV and radio, and he has travelled in
Europe, the United States and Japan, testing instruments with top
professional symphonic and session players, and presenting papers at
international conferences on acoustics and instrument design. In 2000,
Richard's cornet 'The Soloist' was awarded Millennium Product Status
by the U.K. Design Council, recognising its enduring place among the
best of British design, creativity and innovation, as 'a brass cornet
with a unique system of interchangeable leadpipes, providing several
instruments in one body that match changing playing conditions and
genres.' These awards were granted to only 1,000 British products and
services, deemed to be challenging existing conventions and solving
key problems in an environmentally and ethically sound manner, as
judged by a panel of judges drawn from design, business, science and
the arts. In 2008, Richard was made an Honorary Fellow of the College
of Science and Engineering (University of Edinburgh), in recognition
of his collaborative work within the School of Physics on the
measurement and understanding of the acoustics of brass instruments.
He continues to maintain a close association with Edinburgh
University, and is furthering the training of the next generation of
British brass instrument designers and makers through a series of
apprenticeship schemes. Richard moved to North Yorkshire in 2005 and
in 2010, he celebrated, with Derek, 25 years of designing and building
specialist brass instruments.
Host: charles.fox@sheffield.ac.uk
Steve Renals
University of Edinburgh
(Deep) neural nets in speech recognition
In this talk I'll present some of our recent work in using deep neural networks (DNNs) for speech recognition. Amongst other things the talk will include:
- a discussion of the similarities and differences between the recently discovered deep neural network approaches, and the neural network approaches used for speech recognition in the 80s, 90s, and 00s;
- MLAN, an approach to incorporate out-of-domain data using posterior features;
- supervised and unsupervised ways to make use of multilingual acoustic training data;
- comparison of tandem (DNN outputs used as features) and hybrid (DNN outputs used directly as probability estimates) approaches, and their combinations.
The talk will include results of experiments on Globalphone, BBC broadcasts, and TED talks.
This is joint work with Peter Bell, Arnab Ghoshal, and Pawel Swietojanski.
Host: charles.fox@sheffield.ac.uk
