Research
machine learning for audio, audio signal processing, music information retrieval, binaural audio
Interests
Johan’s aim is to make machines understand audio to the level of a trained professional, such that new tools can be developed to assist musicians performing live or in the studio, listeners navigating large music collections and learners studying music. To that end, he uses a combination of machine learning, signal processing, data science and music theory. In recent years, he has been working on narrowing the gap between academic research and user-centric applications, web-based music services and the personalisation of spatial and immersive audio.
Publications of specific relevance to the Centre for Multimodal AI

Publications of specific relevance to the Centre for Multimodal AI
2025
Temporal Considerations in DJ Mix Information Retrieval and GenerationWilliams A Meehan G Lattner S Pauwels J Barthet M
32nd International Symposium on Temporal Representation and Reasoning London, United Kingdom 27 Aug 2025 - 29 Aug 2025.
13-10-2025
Artist Considerations in Offline Evaluation of Music Recommender SystemsMeehan G Pauwels J
3rd Music Recommender Systems Workshop Prague, Czech Republic 22 Sep 2025.
28-09-2025
On Inherited Popularity Bias in Cold-Start Item RecommendationMeehan G Pauwels J
Proceedings of the Nineteenth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems., 649-654.
07-09-2025
Listener Acoustic Personalization ChallengeLAP24: Head-Related Transfer Function Dataset HarmonizationDaugintis R Barumerli R Geronazzo M Pauwels J Picinali L Poole KC
IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing,
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) vol. 6, 950-964.
28-07-2025
Towards a Unified Representation Evaluation Framework Beyond Downstream TasksPlachouras C Guinot J Fazekas G Quinton E Benetos E Pauwels J
International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN) Rome, Italy 30 Jun 2025 - 5 Jul 2025.
30-06-2025
Learning Music Audio Representations With Limited DataPlachouras C Benetos E Pauwels J
IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) Hyderabad, India 6 Apr 2025 - 11 Apr 2025.
06-04-20252024
Evaluation of pretrained language models on music understandingVasilakis I Bittner R Pauwels J
NLP4MusA 15 Nov 2024.
15-11-2024
I can listen but cannot read: An evaluation of two-tower multimodal systems for instrument recognitionVasilakis I Bittner R Pauwels J
25th International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) San Francisco, CA, USA 10 Nov 2024 - 14 Nov 2024.
10-11-2024
Multi-Signal Informed Attention for Beat and Downbeat DetectionBolt J Pauwels J Fazekas G
2024 IEEE 5th International Symposium on the Internet of Sounds (IS2). vol. 00, 1-7.
02-10-2024
Evaluation of pretrained language models on music understandingVasilakis Y Bittner R Pauwels J
17-09-2024
I can listen but cannot read: An evaluation of two-tower multimodal\n systems for instrument recognitionVasilakis Y Bittner R Pauwels J
25-07-2024
Musician-AI partnership mediated by emotionally-aware smart musical instrumentsTurchet L Stefani D Pauwels J
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies,
Elsevier vol. 191, 103340-103340.
23-07-2024
Time-of-arrival Estimation and Phase Unwrapping of Head-related Transfer Functions With Integer Linear ProgrammingYu C-Y Pauwels J Fazekas G
Audio Engineering Society 156th Convention Madrid, Spain 15 Jun 2024 - 17 Jun 2024.
15-06-2024
Time-of-arrival estimation and phase unwrapping of head-related transfer functions with integer linear programmingYu CY Pauwels J Fazekas G
AES Madrid 2024 156th Audio Engineering Society Convention.
01-01-20242023
Polar Manhattan Displacement: measuring tonal distances between chords based on intervallic contentMiller J Pauwels J Sandler M
24th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference Milan, Italy 5 Nov 2023 - 9 Nov 2023.
04-11-2023
The SONICOM HRTF DatasetEngel I Daugintis R Vicente T Hogg AOT Pauwels J Tournier AJ Picinali L
Journal of The Audio Engineering Society,
Audio Engineering Society vol. 71 (5), 241-253.
09-05-2023
On the relevance of the differences between HRTF measurement setups for machine learningPauwels J Picinali L
2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2023).
05-05-2023
“Give me happy pop songs in C major and with a fast tempo”: A vocal assistant for content-based queries to online music repositoriesTurchet L Zanotto C Pauwels J
International Journal of Human Computer Studies vol. 173
01-05-2023
POLAR MANHATTAN DISPLACEMENT: MEASURING TONAL DISTANCES BETWEEN CHORDS BASED ON INTERVALLIC CONTENTMiller J Pauwels J Sandler M
In
Proceedings of The International Society For Music Information Retrieval Conference 868-874.
01-01-20232022
On The Relevance Of The Differences Between HRTF Measurement Setups For\n Machine LearningPauwels J Picinali L
08-12-2022
Music Emotion Recognition: Intention of Composers-Performers Versus Perception of Musicians, Non-Musicians, and Listening MachinesTurchet L Pauwels J
IEEE/Acm Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing vol. 30, 305-316.
01-01-20222021
The WASABI Dataset: Cultural, Lyrics and Audio Analysis Metadata About 2 Million Popular Commercially Released SongsBuffa M Cabrio E Fell M Gandon F Giboin A Hennequin R Michel F Pauwels J et al.
In
The Semantic Web,
Springer Nature 515-531.
01-01-20212020
Cloud-smart Musical Instrument InteractionsTurchet L Pauwels J Fischione C Fazekas G
Acm Transactions on Internet of Things vol. 1 (3), 1-29.
14-07-2020
A Critical Look at the Applicability of Markov Logic Networks for Music Signal AnalysisPauwels J Fazekas G Sandler MB
In
Arxiv 16-01-20202019
20 Years of Automatic Chord Recognition from AudioPauwels J O'Hanlon K Gómez E Sandler M
Proceedings of the 20th Conference of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) Delft, Netherlands 4 Nov 2019 - 8 Nov 2019.
07-11-2019
Guitar String Separation Using Non-Negative Matrix Factorization and Factor DeconvolutionSenvaityte D Pauwels J Sandler M
Audio Mostly 2019.
18-09-2019
Finding new practice material through chord-based exploration of a large music cataloguePauwels J Sandler M
Proceedings of the 16th Sound and Music Conference Málaga, Spain 28 May 2019 - 31 May 2019.
31-05-2019
A web-based system for suggesting new practice material to music learners based on chord contentPauwels J Sandler MB
2nd Workshop on Intelligent Music Interfaces for Listening and Creation 20 Mar 2019. vol. 2327
20-03-20192018
Exploring Real-time Visualisations to Support Chord Learning with a Large Music CollectionPauwels J Xambo Sedo A Roma G Barthet M Fazekas G
4th Web Audio Conference (WAC) Berlin, Germany 19 Sep 2018 - 21 Sep 2018.
19-09-2018
pywebaudioplayer: Bridging the gap between audio processing code and attractive visualisations based on web technologyPauwels J Sandler M
4th Web Audio Conference (WAC) Berlin, Germany 19 Sep 2018 - 21 Sep 2018.
19-09-2018
Jam with JamendoXambó A Pauwels J Roma G Barthet M Fazekas G
Proceedings of the Audio Mostly 2018 on Sound in Immersion and Emotion., 1-7.
12-09-2018
Recommending songs to music learners based on chord contentPauwels J Fazekas G Sandler M
2018 Joint Workshop on Machine Learning for Music Stockholm, Sweden 14 Jul 2018.
14-07-2018
Guitarset: A dataset for guitar transcriptionXi Q Bittner RM Pauwels J Ye X Bello JP
International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference., 453-460.
01-01-20182017
Guitar-set preview: a dataset for guitar transcription and moreXi Q Bittner RM PAUWELS J EWERT S Bello JP
18th Conference of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR): Late Breaking/Demo Session Suzhou, China 23 Oct 2017 - 27 Dec 2017.
23-10-2017
Improved template-based chord recognition using the CRP featureO'Hanlon KO Ewert S Pauwels J Sandler M
2017 IEEE Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing.
19-06-2017
Confidence Measures and Their Applications in Music Labelling Systems Based on Hidden Markov ModelsPauwels J O hanlon K Fazekas G Sandler M
Proc. 18th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR), Oct. 23-27, Suzhou, China., 279-279.
01-01-20172016
Chord RecognitionPeeters G Pauwels J Weihs C Jannach D Vatolkin I Rudolph G
In
Music Data Analysis: Foundations and Applications,
Taylor & Francis Inc 07-11-2016
Exploiting prior knowledge during automatic key and chord estimation from musical audioPAUWELS J
24-03-20162014
Combining Musicological Knowledge About Chords and Keys in a Simultaneous Chord and Local Key Estimation SystemPauwels J Martens J-P
Journal of New Music Research,
Taylor & Francis vol. 43 (3), 318-330.
03-07-2014
On comparative statistics for labelling tasks: what can we learn from MIREX ACE 2013?Burgoyne JA de Haas WB Pauwels J
15th Conference of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR)., 525-530.
01-01-20142013
Segmenting music through the joint estimation of keys, chords and structural boundariesPauwels J Peeters G
Proceedings of the 21st ACM international conference on Multimedia., 741-744.
21-10-2013
EVALUATING AUTOMATICALLY ESTIMATED CHORD SEQUENCESPauwels J Peeters G
2013 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing., 749-753.
01-05-2013
Combining harmony-based and novelty-based approaches for structural segmentationPauwels J Kaiser F Peeters G
14th Conference of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR)., 138-143.
01-01-20132011
The influence of chord duration modeling on chord and local key extractionPauwels J Martens J-P Leman M
2011 10th International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications and Workshops. vol. 2, 136-141.
01-12-2011
MODELING MUSICOLOGICAL INFORMATION AS TRIGRAMS IN A SYSTEM FOR SIMULTANEOUS CHORD AND LOCAL KEY EXTRACTIONPauwels J Martens J-P Leman M
2011 IEEE International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing., 1-6.
01-09-2011
Improving the key extraction performance of a simultaneous local key and chord estimation systemPauwels J Martens J-P Leman M
IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME).
01-01-20112010
Integrating musicological knowledge into a probabilistic framework for chord and key extractionPauwels J Martens JP
128th Audio Engineering Society Convention 2010. vol. 2, 717-725.
01-12-20102008
A novel chroma representation of polyphonic music based on multiple pitch tracking techniquesVarewyck M Pauwels J Martens J-P
Proceedings of the 16th ACM international conference on Multimedia., 667-670.
26-10-2008
Evaluating Contrastive Methodologies for Music Representation Learning Using Playlist DataMeehan G Pauwels J
International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing 6 Apr 2025 - 11 Apr 2025.
A 2 Million Commercial Song Interactive NavigatorBuffa M Pauwels J Lebrun J Pellerin G
Proceedings of the 5th Web Audio Conference (WAC) Trondheim, Norway 4 Dec 2019 - 6 Dec 2019.
The Hartufo toolkit for machine learning with HRTF dataPauwels J
AES 2023 International Conference on Spatial and Immersive Audio Huddersfield, UK 23 Aug 2023 - 25 Aug 2023.