SoundSoftware tutorial and RR Prizes at AES53

We'll be co-presenting the first tutorial session at the Audio Engineering Society 53rd Conference on Semantic Audio, this weekend, and awarding the Prizes for Reproducible Research in the field of Semantic Audio.

Update: The slides and exercise handouts from the tutorial can now be found here. We enjoyed it—if you were there, thanks for coming and we hope you enjoyed it too!

Our tutorial is about developing better and more reliable software during research work. We can't cover this subject deeply, but we hope to inspire attendees with ideas about:

  • making readable experimental code using the IPython Notebook, and sharing code for review with colleagues and supervisors;
  • using version control software to manage revisions and escape disaster;
  • modularising and testing any code that can be used in more than one experiment;
  • packaging, publishing, and licensing code;
  • and the motivations for doing the above.

We presented a session at the Digital Audio Effects (DAFx) conference in 2012 which covered much of this material in presentation style, and a tutorial at the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) in 2012 which featured a "live" example of test-driven development in research software. You can find videos and slides from those tutorials here on our site. The theme of this one is similar, and we'll be reusing some code from the ISMIR tutorial, but we hope to make this one a bit more hands-on.