Adib Mehrabi

Christopher Ick, Adib Mehrabi, Wenyu Jin

Modeling room acoustics in a field setting involves some degree of blind parameter estimation from noisy and reverberant audio. Modern approaches leverage convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in tandem with time-frequency representation. Using short-time Fourier transforms to develop these spectrogram-like features has shown promising results, but this method implicitly discards a significant amount of audio information in the phase domain. Inspired by recent works in speech enhancement, we propose utilizing novel phase-related features to extend recent approaches to blindly estimate the so-called "reverberation fingerprint" parameters, namely, volume and RT60. The addition of these features is shown to outperform existing methods that rely solely on magnitude-based spectral features across a wide range of acoustics spaces. We evaluate the effectiveness of the deployment of these novel features in both single-parameter and multi-parameter estimation strategies, using a novel dataset that consists of publicly available room impulse responses (RIRs), synthesized RIRs, and in-house measurements of real acoustic spaces.

Adib Mehrabi, Keunwoo Choi, Simon Dixon et al.

The expressive nature of the voice provides a powerful medium for communicating sonic ideas, motivating recent research on methods for query by vocalisation. Meanwhile, deep learning methods have demonstrated state-of-the-art results for matching vocal imitations to imitated sounds, yet little is known about how well learned features represent the perceptual similarity between vocalisations and queried sounds. In this paper, we address this question using similarity ratings between vocal imitations and imitated drum sounds. We use a linear mixed effect regression model to show how features learned by convolutional auto-encoders (CAEs) perform as predictors for perceptual similarity between sounds. Our experiments show that CAEs outperform three baseline feature sets (spectrogram-based representations, MFCCs, and temporal features) at predicting the subjective similarity ratings. We also investigate how the size and shape of the encoded layer effects the predictive power of the learned features. The results show that preservation of temporal information is more important than spectral resolution for this application.