1. Proposal number: 17

“Learning Musical Instruments Through Spectral and Temporal Analysis”

2. Should this proposal be considered for the Best Proposal prize? no

3. On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the overall organization/clarity
of the proposal? 5

4. On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the overall project idea? 7

Then write 2-3 pages of helpful feedback to the proposal's
author(s). The following questions should help you organize your
feedback:

* Overall, is the proposal clear, concise, and well-organized?

The organization is ok, but overall, the writing in the proposal would have been much better if it had been proofed and edited a bit more.

* Does the proposal meet the posted proposal guidelines?

Most of them are met, but some are missing. For exampple, there is no related work cited. The proposed method could have been explained in more detail as well.

* How does the project idea fit within the framework of Developmental Robotics?

It is not entirely clear from the proposal. While there are many approaches to sound classification, not all of them are developmental. In addition to simply
classifying the sounds by instrument, a developmental approach would also need to be able to autonomously categorize the sounds and/or categorize the instruments. Also,
it is not clear whether the sounds will be segmented manually before hand, or if the module will automatically segment the incoming audio stream and classify each sound
segment.


* Describe what you like BEST and LEAST about the project idea.

I like the idea of a system which can learn about sounds through experience, especially the idea of learning sound categories automatically, since such a method would
have applications in a wide variety of settings.

What I don’t like about this proposal is that there is little detail regarding the developmental aspects of it.

* Do you have any concerns about the project? Does it seem doable in the remaining time?

It seems doable.

* Does it seem too difficult?

It really depends on how far the author is willing to go. Simply extracting sound features and using a MATLAB classifier is easy.

* Are there any major details left out?

Quite a few. There is little distinction in the proposal between classification and categorization, for example. Methods for feature extraction are also not very well
defined.

* Does the idea rely upon technologies that are not currently available?

No.

* Do you have any suggestions for improvement? Do you have any suggestions for related work that should be cited?

I have several suggestions since I think the project needs to go somewhat beyond simply classifying the sounds according to instruments using a trained classifier.

First, the author could also include the task of unsupervised sound categorization, sort of like Shane’s work on containers in which the robot learned a hierarchical
taxonomy of sounds. Such a learned hierarchy can be evaluated on whether it matches some known information about the sounds, such as their instruments.

Second, it would also be nice to explore intelligent methods of feature extraction - there are many types of features in a sound, but if the relevant features are
identified by the programmer rather than the learning module, then the project wouldn’t be in the spirit of developmental robotics.

Another possible route could involve the use of active learning algorithms which ask for labelled examples in an intelligent manner, to maximize learning progress.