Judith "Judy" C. Brown is an American physicist and professor emerita at

Wellesley College Wellesley College is a Private university, private Women's colleges in the United States, historically women's Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Wellesley, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1870 by Henr ...

. She was a visiting scientist at the

MIT Media Lab The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fi ...

in the Machine Listening Group for over 20 years, and is recognized for her contributions in

music information retrieval Music information retrieval (MIR) is the interdisciplinary science of retrieving information from music. Those involved in MIR may have a background in academic musicology, psychoacoustics, psychology, signal processing, informatics, machine lear ...

, including developing the

constant-Q transform In mathematics and signal processing, the constant-Q transform and variable-Q transform, simply known as CQT and VQT, transforms a data series to the frequency domain. It is related to the Fourier transformJudith C. BrownCalculation of a constant Q ...

. She is a Fellow of the

Acoustical Society of America The Acoustical Society of America (ASA) is an international scientific society founded in 1929 dedicated to generating, disseminating and promoting the knowledge of acoustics and its practical applications. The Society is primarily a voluntary org ...

(ASA) and has served on the ASA technical committees for

musical acoustics Musical acoustics or music acoustics is a multidisciplinary field that combines knowledge from physics, psychophysics, organology (classification of the instruments), physiology, music theory, ethnomusicology, signal processing and instrument buil ...

and animal

bioacoustics Bioacoustics is a cross-disciplinary science that combines biology and acoustics. Usually it refers to the investigation of sound production, dispersion and reception in animals (including humans). This involves neurophysiology, neurophysiological ...

Biography

Brown was born in

Teague, Texas Teague ( ) or ( ) is a city in Freestone County, Texas, Freestone County, Texas, United States. The population was 3,384 at the 2020 census. Settlement Teague, Texas, was initially settled around the time of the American Civil War, Civil War and ...

and attended

Rice University William Marsh Rice University, commonly referred to as Rice University, is a Private university, private research university in Houston, Houston, Texas, United States. Established in 1912, the university spans 300 acres. Rice University comp ...

for her bachelor's degree in chemistry. She attended the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

for her PhD and then spent three years as a postdoctoral fellow in

solid state physics Solid-state physics is the study of rigid matter, or solids, through methods such as solid-state chemistry, quantum mechanics, crystallography, electromagnetism, and metallurgy. It is the largest branch of condensed matter physics. Solid-state p ...

at the Centre d'Etudes Nucleaires de Saclay. She then joined the faculty in the physics department at Wellesley College, where she taught the first

quantum mechanics Quantum mechanics is the fundamental physical Scientific theory, theory that describes the behavior of matter and of light; its unusual characteristics typically occur at and below the scale of atoms. Reprinted, Addison-Wesley, 1989, It is ...

course at Wellesley. She joined the

as a visiting scientist in 1986 to conduct research on computer perception of music and developed classification algorithms for marine mammal sounds. She was elected a Fellow of the

in 1999 for her contributions in applying signal processing to

, frequency tracking, instrument identification, and spectral analysis. She retired in 2005.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Brown, Judy Living people Rice University alumni University of California, Berkeley alumni Wellesley College faculty MIT Media Lab people Fellows of the Acoustical Society of America 21st-century American physicists Acousticians People from Freestone County, Texas Year of birth missing (living people)