I am a UKRI funded PhD researcher at the Centre for Digital Music (C4DM) at the School for Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London and part of the Media and Arts Technology Centre for Doctoral Training . My research is titled Sketching Sounds: Using sound-shape associations to build a sketch-based sound synthesiser and it is routed in Music Computing, Human Computer Interaction, Computer Vision and Human Perception and Cognition. I am designing and conducting user studies to create a substantial dataset of sound-sketches and use accomplished statistical and novel machine learning methods for analysis.
Research Overview
Humans are surprisingly good at creating mental images of sound. However, sound-design tools are not always intuitive when it comes to realising an idea in a straightforward way.
When describing a sound, we often refer to associations with other areas like colour, movement or light. This project looks deeper into how people express their sound ideas through shapes and forms.
These findings are used to build a system that produces sound based on a simple sketch input. This approach allows anyone to explore, find and produce sounds in a simple and direct way.
You can have a look at this GitHub repository for more detailed information or check out my publications.
Publications
How to sketch timbre: investigating sound-shape associations in free-form graphical representations of sound.
Sebastian Löbbers and György Fazekas
In Journal of New Music Research (under review) — May 2024
SketchSynth: a browser-based sketching interface for sound control
Sebastian Löbbers and György Fazekas
In Proceedings of International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) 2023 — May 2023
AI as mediator between composers, sound designers, and creative media producers
Sebastian Löbbers, Mathieu Barthet and György Fazekas
In Integrating AI in Human-Human Collaborative Ideation workshop at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems — April 2023
SketchSynth: cross-modal control of sound synthesis
Sebastian Löbbers, Louise Thorpe and György Fazekas
In Proceedings of 12th International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Music, Sound, Art and Design (EvoMUSART) — April 2023
Seeing Sounds, Hearing Shapes: a gamified study to evaluate sound-sketches
Sebastian Löbbers and György Fazekas
In Proceedings of the 2022 International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) — July 2022
Sketching Sounds: Using sound-shape associations to build a sketch-based sound synthesizer
Sebastian Löbbers and György Fazekas
In DMRN+16: Digital Music Research Network One-Day Workshop — December 2021
Representation of musical timbre through visual sketching
Sebastian Löbbers and György Fazekas
In Proceedings of 16th International Conference of Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC-ESCOM) — July 2021
Sketching Sounds: an exploratory study on sound-shape associations
Sebastian Löbbers, Mathieu Barthet and György Fazekas
In Proceedings of the 2021 International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) — July 2021