The field of audio processing and analysis is witnessing significant developments, with a focus on improving the accuracy and efficiency of various tasks such as source separation, audio classification, and music mixing. Researchers are exploring innovative approaches, including the use of recurrent neural networks, cross-modal distillation, and differentiable processors, to advance the state-of-the-art in these areas. Notably, there is a growing interest in developing methods that can operate in real-time, on low-power devices, and without requiring large amounts of labeled data.
Some noteworthy papers in this regard include: SightSound-R1, which demonstrates the effectiveness of cross-modal distillation in improving the reasoning capabilities of audio-language models. Identifying birdsong syllables without labelled data, which presents a fully unsupervised algorithm for decomposing birdsong recordings into sequences of syllables. Enabling Multi-Species Bird Classification on Low-Power Bioacoustic Loggers, which introduces an efficient neural network for real-time multi-species bird audio classification on low-power microcontrollers.