About

I obtained my PhD at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 2003. My dissertation was about distributed systems. Afterwards I was more interested in signal processing. In particular one project, which I had started in 2001, kept growing throughout the years.

  • BpmDj is software to mix music visually. It relies on a novel method to visualize music, called beatgraphs. A beatgraph plots the energy content of a track along two dimensions. From top to bottom 1 bar is shown, and then in the same image, from left to right all bars are shown. This visualisation makes it possible to easily overlay tracks and align their beats. BpmDj further finds similar sounding music through nearest neighbor detection, it measures tempo, provides a series of filters, a limiter, a time stretcher and export functionality. All in all: a complete product ready to be used.

Aside from that one large project, there are a couple of smaller ones that were also quite interesting.

  • Cryosleep is software that generates brainwaves by forcing a binaural beat to appear. It does this however not by generating two competing tones. Instead it takes an audio track of your choise and modifies the sound inaudibly such that both channels cancel out X times per second. This is supposed to synchronize the listeners’ brain and thereby potentially help people relax. Oddly, the emails I get about this program are mostly from nutcases and people with behavioral issues.
  • Flow is an object oriented database that replaced SQL as backend in BpmDj. The database supports a transactional memory, virtual paging, garbage collection, garbage compaction, change listeners and petri-nets.

Next to these two projects, there are some scientific achievements of which I’m proud.

Then there is research which opened opportunities but where the ‘inventive’ step took a lot less work.

If interested in my curriculum, feel free to download the following PDF