Welcome to the International Audio Laboratories Erlangen
The International Audio Laboratories Erlangen (AudioLabs) are a joint institution of Fraunhofer IIS and Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU). The AudioLabs were founded in 2010 and are unique worldwide in both its mission and international approach: A team of globally-renowned scientists is working to shape the future of audio and multimedia technologies in research areas such as audio coding, audio signal analysis and perceptual spatial audio signal processing.
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Highlight of Current Research
Sorting Sounds by Ear
A small neural network receives sounds that differ only in pitch and loudness, and has to describe each one with two numbers before reconstructing it. Nobody tells the network what pitch or loudness is, so whatever representation it ends up with was learned only from examples. In one chapter of his PhD thesis, Simon Schwär shows that the outcome depends on a single design choice, namely how the similarity between the original and reconstructed sounds is measured during training. Comparing the sounds sample by sample leads to a patchwork of disconnected islands in the latent space (A). A standard comparison of the frequency spectra leaves the latent space without much recognizable structure (B). Only when the comparison responds smoothly to changes in pitch, the latent space is neatly organized (C). This simple example illustrates a more general point: What a machine learns depends on the way we measure similarity.
Highlight of Current Education
A new open-access book, PCPT: A Preparation Course in PyTorch. Through the Principles of Signal Processing, by Meinard Müller and Sebastian Strahl, is now available. It introduces PyTorch through basic machine learning and signal processing concepts and is designed for practical lab courses and self-study. The underlying Jupyter notebooks are also freely available online.
Meinard Müller, Sebastian Strahl
PCPT: A Preparation Course in PyTorch
Through the Principles of Signal Processing
1st edition, 229 p., softcover
ISBN: 978-3-96147-944-3
DOI: 10.25593/978-3-96147-945-0
FAU University Press, 2026
Book (PDF)
Book (Print)
Notebooks (GitHub)
Notebooks (HTML)
Recent Publications
JOURNALS
- IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (IEEE-TASLP)
- Applied Acoustics
- Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval
- The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA)
- Frontiers in Virtual Reality
CONFERENCES
- International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), May 2026
- Differentiable Pulsetable Synthesis for Wind Instrument Modeling
- Low-Resource Text-to-Speech Synthesis Using Noise-Augmented Training of ForwardTacotron
- DeePAQ: a Perceptual Audio Quality Metric based on Foundational Models and Weakly Supervised Learning
- Fine-Tuning Bigvgan-V2 for Robust Musical Tuning Preservation
- International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR), September 2025
- Interspeech Conference, September 2026