I am absolutely *delighted* to learn that the City of Cambridge maintains a publicly accessible database of nearly 50,000 trees in Cambridge, MA, complete with information on location, species, ownership, and more. My personal website now offers you a tree-of-the-day to visit on your daily walk!

Kartik Chandra @kach@mastodon.mit.edu

· 29mo ago

I wrote a little blog post about an interesting perceptual effect I found that's related to pareidolia and peripheral vision.

https://hardmath123.github.io/peripheral-pareidolia.html

hardmath123.github.io

Peripheral pareidolia - Comfortably Numbered

Kartik Chandra @kach@mastodon.mit.edu

· 22mo ago

Hi friends! Greetings from SIGGRAPH Asia! If you happen to be around and would like to meet up, please send me an email. :)

PS I'm here to present our ~zany~ new paper, "Sketching With Your Voice: 'Non-Phono-realistic' Rendering of Sounds via Vocal Imitation." If you're here, come see our talk on Friday! https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.13507

arXiv.org

Sketching With Your Voice: "Non-Phonorealistic" Rendering of Sounds via Vocal Imitation

We present a method for automatically producing human-like vocal imitations of sounds: the equivalent of "sketching," but for auditory rather than visual representation. Starting with a simulated model of the human vocal tract, we first try generating vocal imitations by tuning the model's control parameters to make the synthesized vocalization match the target sound in terms of perceptually-salient auditory features. Then, to better match human intuitions, we apply a cognitive theory of communi

Kartik Chandra @kach@mastodon.mit.edu

· 30mo ago

Spies from Caltech have infiltrated MIT's media ecosystem!

Kartik Chandra @kach@mastodon.mit.edu

· 19mo ago

Sometimes, conversations with my advisor inspire ideas for new research. Other times, they inspire ideas for new memes.

Kartik Chandra @kach@mastodon.mit.edu

· 22mo ago

Replying to

@otherthings@mastodon.social @windytan@mastodon.social Yes, samples are online here! https://matthewcaren.github.io/vocal-imitation/ I'm glad you liked it. I thought it would make you smile. :) That speech-to-birdsong conversion is really lovely — thank you for sharing!

matthewcaren.github.io

Sketching with your voice | Sound Examples

Kartik Chandra @kach@mastodon.mit.edu

· 32mo ago

Tinkering around with @PyTorch this evening, I seem to have trained a 77-parameter (not a typo) Transformer Quine that autoregressively generates a lossy copy of its own weights.

Kartik Chandra @kach@mastodon.mit.edu

· 35mo ago

Replying to

@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org I'm a graphics academic on Mastadon! :)