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Academic projects

A list of my academic projects, papers, talks, etc. For an overview of the different projects I worked on throughout my Master's in Music Technology, visit metalgroove.xyz.

Master's Thesis

My major project in grad school was titled "Music demixing with the sliCQ transform," which led to a publication and the thesis I submitted for my Master of Arts degree in 2022 from the McGill Music Technology department.

It attempts to replace the STFT with the sliCQT, a nonuniform time-frequency transform, in Open-Unmix, a PyTorch AI model (deep learning neural network) for music source separation.

I worked on it during the AICrowd Music Demixing Challenge 2021 (MDX21). The code for the project and related files are on GitHub: https://github.com/sevagh/xumx-sliCQ, https://github.com/sevagh/xumx_slicq_extra

Papers, posters, and publications

Cadenza Challenge Workshop 2023, https://cadenzachallenge.org/cadenza2023-workshop/papers/cad1_23_hanssian_paper.pdf 

@inproceedings{xumxslicqmdx23,
    title={Better music demixing with the sliCQ transform},
    author={Hanssian, Sevag},
    booktitle={1st Cadenza Workshop on Machine Learning Challenges to Improve Music for People with Hearing Loss},
    year={2023}}

Master's Thesis @ McGill University 2022, https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/concern/theses/3197xr696 

@mastersthesis{slicqdemixsevag22,
  title={Music demixing with the sliced constant-Q transform},
  author={Hanssian, Sevag},
  school={McGill University},
  year={2022}}

MDX21 workshop @ ISMIR 2021, https://mdx-workshop.github.io/proceedings/hanssian.pdf 

@inproceedings{xumxslicqmdx21,
    title={Music demixing with the sliCQ transform},
    author={Hanssian, Sevag},
    booktitle={MDX21 workshop at ISMIR 2021},
    year={2021}}

arXiv.org:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.05509
https://cs.paperswithcode.com/paper/music-demixing-with-the-slicq-transform 

@article{xumxslicqarxiv,
    title={Music demixing with the sliCQ transform},
    author={Hanssian, Sevag},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2112.05509},
    url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.05509},
    year={2021}}

Poster at ISMIR 2021 (MDX workshop):
https://github.com/sevagh/xumx_slicq_extra/blob/main/drafts-and-blobs/mdx21-poster.pdf

Poster at CIRMMT The Future of Sound 2021:
https://github.com/sevagh/xumx_slicq_extra/blob/main/drafts-and-blobs/futureofsound-poster.pdf

Videos, talks, and presentations

15 min talk at the Cadenza Challenge 2023 Workshop about the updated xumx-sliCQ:

30 min talk at the MILA Music AI reading group about xumx-sliCQ:

Short 5-minute talk at the MDX21 town hall about xumx-sliCQ: