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

Wellesley College Wellesley College is a private women's liberal arts college in Wellesley, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1870 by Henry and Pauline Durant as a female seminary, it is a member of the original Seven Sisters Colleges, an unofficial g ...

. 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 School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from ...

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. MIR is a small but growing field of research with many real-world applications. Those involved in MIR may have a background in academic musicol ...

, 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 transform Judith C. BrownCalculation of a constant ...

. 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 orga ...

(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 neurophysiological and anatomical b ...

Biography

Brown was born in

Teague, Texas Teague is a city in Freestone County, Texas, United States. The population was 3,384 at the 2020 census. Settlement The area was first settled around the time of the Civil War. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, a small community kn ...

and attended

Rice University William Marsh Rice University (Rice University) is a Private university, private research university in Houston, Houston, Texas. It is on a 300-acre campus near the Houston Museum District and adjacent to the Texas Medical Center. Rice is ranke ...

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 land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

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 quantum mechanics, crystallography, electromagnetism, and metallurgy. It is the largest branch of condensed matter physics. Solid-state physics studies how the l ...

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 a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles. It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistry, ...

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)