Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (KTH) in Stockholm is Sweden’s largest technical university. The Sound and Music Computing Group (SMC, formerly Music Acoustics) of the Department of Speech, Music and Hearing at KTH is the leader for WP2 (Case studies) and WP3 (Phonetic listening and world-event repre- sentation). In the KTH 2012 International Research Assessment Exercise, the Department was evaluated as part of Applied Computer Science, as, quote “Research output is internationally excellent in all fields, with a substantial number of units reaching the level of world-leading quality.”
The SMC group has considerable experience of European projects and actions, such as MOSART, SoundingObject, Agnula, Marie Curie Training Site, S2S2, IMUTUS, VEMUS, and BrainTuning; as well as COST Actions IC0601 Sonic Interaction Design and 2103 Advanced Voice Function Assessment. One currently EU-funded project is EUNISON, which in its topic is complementary to the proposed SkAT-VG project. In addition, the SMC Group is in the same department as the well-known Speech Communica- tion and Technology Group, with many points of convergence with the SkAT-VG project, and with very extensive experience of EU-funded projects.
Key Staff
Sten Ternström (Local Manager) received his Ph.D. in Music Acoustics at KTH in 1989, and has been professor of Music Acoustics since 2003. His research interests center on the human voice, but extend also across music, electronics, audio technology, computing and signal processing, subjects in which he also teaches. He has been principal investigator for numerous voice-related research projects, funded mostly by Swedish research councils and foundations. Ternström is the project coordinator of the FET-Open EUNISON project 2013-2016. Ternström co-founded and worked in a signal processing company 1995-2000 and has written commercial voice analysis software, in addition to some 60 scientific papers and book chapters. He is work package Leader and Local Coordinator for WP2 and WP3.
Pétur Helgason studies human articulation and the linguistic organization of sounds in speech. He holds a PhD in Phonetics from Stockholm University and has since been a senior lecturer at Uppsala University and, from 2016, at Stockholm University. His research activities include speech synthesis, articulatory analysis of speech, historical phonetics and linguistic phonology.
Anders Friberg, associate professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, has been working mainly with synthesis and analysis of music performance, including a rule system translating the score to performance. Recently, the focus has been on music perception including extraction of perceptual features from audio and its relation to ecological perception. In the SkAT-VG project, he works with the prediction of articulatory parameters from audio.
Gláucía Laís Salomão received her Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics in 2009 from PUC in São Paulo, Brazil; this included a scholarship for the doctoral stage carried out at TMH-KTH. Since 2010 she has been involved in various voice-related research projects at KTH as well as in cooperation with other European universities. From 2014 she has also been part of the research team at Stockholm University’s Department of Linguistics for modeling audio-visual interactional cues throughout the period of the emergence of the child’s first vocalizations and vocal imitations. Her main research interest is in the human voice and speech, in particular the relationships between voice production and perception; vocal expression of emotions; phonetics; psycholinguistics; and multimodality in oral communication.