[Ideas] When AI learns to listen: sound revolution and machine listening

When AI learns to listen: sound revolution and machine listening

Gaël Richard, professor at Télécom Paris, audio processing specialist and Hi! Paris scientific co-director, March 2025

Machine listening is currently experiencing a meteoric rise in popularity. This field of research, based on the intersection of machine learning and deep learning, applies to a wide variety of sound signals for uses as varied as speech synthesis, sound source separation and automatic recognition of instruments and voices.

While its applications are becoming more widely available to the general public, they are rooted in complex scientific advances, driven in particular by figures such as Gaël Richard, who was awarded an European ERC grant in 2022 for his Hi-Audio project. This ambitious programme aims to develop hybrid approaches combining signal processing and deep learning to analyse and understand sounds with unrivalled precision.

Hi-Audio (Hybrid and Interpretable Deep Neural Audio Machines) is an European Research Council “Advanced Grant” (AdG) project supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Grant Agreement-101052978.

Interview by Isabelle Mauriac, in French with English subtitles

Hybrid deep models and asynchronous recording platform