New paper out on 'nnAudio' - congrats to my PhD student Raven Cheuk!

So proud of Raven for driving forward this excellent work. Our paper is entitled "nnAudio: An on-the-Fly GPU Audio to Spectrogram Conversion Toolbox Using 1D Convolutional Neural Network" (authors: Kin Wai Raven Cheuk, Hans Anderson, Kat Agres, and Dorien Herremans). It's open access (free to read!) and published at IEEE Access, available here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9174990?source=authoralert

Here's the abstract:
In this paper, we present nnAudio, a new neural network-based audio processing framework with graphics processing unit (GPU) support that leverages 1D convolutional neural networks to perform time domain to frequency domain conversion. It allows on-the-fly spectrogram extraction due to its fast speed, without the need to store any spectrograms on the disk. Moreover, this approach also allows back-propagation on the waveforms-to-spectrograms transformation layer, and hence, the transformation process can be made trainable, further optimizing the waveform-to-spectrogram transformation for the specific task that the neural network is trained on. All spectrogram implementations scale as Big-O of linear time with respect to the input length. nnAudio, however, leverages the compute unified device architecture (CUDA) of 1D convolutional neural network from PyTorch, its short-time Fourier transform (STFT), Mel spectrogram, and constant-Q transform (CQT) implementations are an order of magnitude faster than other implementations using only the central processing unit (CPU). We tested our framework on three different machines with NVIDIA GPUs, and our framework significantly reduces the spectrogram extraction time from the order of seconds (using a popular python library librosa) to the order of milliseconds, given that the audio recordings are of the same length. When applying nnAudio to variable input audio lengths, an average of 11.5 hours are required to extract 34 spectrogram types with different parameters from the MusicNet dataset using librosa . An average of 2.8 hours is required for nnAudio , which is still four times faster than librosa. Our proposed framework also outperforms existing GPU processing libraries such as Kapre and torchaudio in terms of processing speed.

And here's the reference:
K. W. Cheuk, H. Anderson, K. Agres and D. Herremans, "nnAudio: An on-the-Fly GPU Audio to Spectrogram Conversion Toolbox Using 1D Convolutional Neural Networks," in IEEE Access, vol. 8, pp. 161981-162003, 2020, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3019084.