%&proposal
\begin{document}
\maketitle

My proposed research consists of two questions of which the thesis will answer
at least one.

The first topic is singing voice detection. Singing voice detection has been
done on numerous amounts of musical styles ranging from unconventional styles
like Beijing opera to conventional pop music. Moreover, the problem has been
tackled using myriads of different approaches such as HMMs with different
acoustic model types but also machine learned feature sets. I would like to
explore how HMM based techniques perform on extreme heavy metal styles to see
how well it can detect growling and how classifier might be adapted to perform
better. Initially the classifier will be a binary classifier that classifies
growling and non-growling. Later on classes might be added such as and musical
genres.

Singing voice detection is often used as a preprocessing step for song lyrics
forced alignment. If the time permits I would like to explore forced alignment
using existing phone models on extreme heavy metal styles. Features probably
need to be changed to improve performance since growling is very different from
regular singing and speaking.

The data for this will be coming from my personal collection audio CDs. For the
singing voice detection the data of one band can be used and even a test set
can be held out since the band made over 15 full studio albums each with a
running time between 30 and 60 minutes. The segmentation for the trainingsdata
can be done by hand. Later, for the lyrics alignment, the labels for the
segments can be found online on song lyric websites. Validation of the
alignment is a bit tricky however since there is no golden standard but my own.

\paragraph{Planning}\strut\\
This results in the following rough outline divided on a month by month basis
shown in Table~\ref{tbl:outline}.
Possible pitfalls can arise in preparing the data since that requires
segmentation. It is expected to take around twice the playing time but that
might be an overestimation.

\begin{table}[ht]
	\centering
	\begin{tabular}{cll}
		\toprule
		Month & Description\\
		\midrule
		March
			& Preparing the data\\
			& Preparing an experiment platform\\
			& Literature research\\
		April
			& Running the experiments\\
			& Fiddle with parameters\\
			& Explore the possibilities for forced alignment\\
		May
			& Write up the thesis\\
			& Possibly do forced alignment\\
		June
			& Finish up thesis\\
			& Wrap up\\
		\bottomrule
	\end{tabular}
	\caption{Outline}\label{tbl:outline}
\end{table}

\end{document}
