A few milestones tell the story best.
I was born in Gorizia, in the north-eastern part of Italy, but soon moved to Brescia where I spent my first quarter of a century. I grew up playing rugby and videogames, listening to my parents' favorite music, and developing a love for science (fiction and non).
Armed with a Behringer B-1, an M-Audio Fast Track, and FL Studio 10, I started recording and mixing a variety of local artists. It was so cool to be part of the production part of music, and I developed some long-life bonds with a few artists during that time.
I built my engineering foundation at the University of Brescia and found my love for signal processing. During that time, I was also playing my first years in Serie A with Rugby Brescia, and getting consistent rap gigs around the province. Ah, the youth.
A scholarship brought me briefly to Aalto University, working on loudness compensation and audio equalization for my thesis with Prof. Vesa Välimäki. Helsinki had -25°C and a lot of snow, and the AkuLab had 30 other music-enthusiast researchers. I had found my place.
I finished my master’s degree at the University of Brescia with 110/110 cum laude. I consider myself extremely lucky to have been part of my class, where I met a lot of great people that went on to succeed in very different fields, academia and industry alike.
My first research experience in industry. In BdSound, I worked on noise reduction for home appliances using adaptive filters and machine learning methods. While I am not a fan of Milan and my living conditions at the time make for quite the story, I remember my time in BdSound fondly.
After I was offered a PhD student position at the Acoustics Lab at Aalto University, I packed my bags and moved to Finland, my (now) home away from home. And yes, I did get to see the northern lights in Lapland.
My doctoral research focused on transient processing for audio time stretching and peak reduction, under the supervision of Prof. Vesa Välimäki. I also got to teach in different courses at bachelor and master level, which was the highlight of my experience. I miss teaching deeply!
I am a research scientist in the radiation physics group. While lacking a physics background, I help with investigations and testing and produce internal tools that make existing workflows more usable and maintainable. The best part is having a real impact in the healthcare world.
These are my publications from the doctoral years, spanning journal articles and conference proceedings.
Fierro, L. “Audio Decomposition for Time Stretching”, Aalto University.
Fierro, L., and Välimäki, V. “Enhanced Fuzzy Decomposition of Sound into Sines, Transients and Noise.” Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, 71(7/8), pp. 468-480.
Välimäki, V., Fierro, L., Schlecht, S. J., and Backman, J. “Audio Peak Reduction Using Ultra-Short Chirps.” Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, 70(6), pp. 485-494.
Fierro, L., Wright, A., Välimäki, V., and Hämäläinen, M. “Extreme Audio Time Stretching Using Neural Synthesis.” In Proc. ICASSP, Rhodes, Greece.
Schlecht, S. J., Fierro, L., Välimäki, V., and Backman, J. “Audio Peak Reduction Using a Synced Allpass Filter.” In Proc. ICASSP, pp. 1006-1010, Singapore.
Fierro, L., and Välimäki, V. “SiTraNo: A MATLAB App for Sines-Transients-Noise Decomposition of Audio Signals.” In Proc. DAFx, Vienna, Austria.
Fierro, L., and Välimäki, V. “Towards Objective Evaluation of Audio Time-Scale Modification Methods.” In Proc. Sound and Music Computing (SMC), Torino, Italy.
Fierro, L., Rämö, J., and Välimäki, V. “Adaptive Loudness Compensation in Music Listening.” In Proc. Sound and Music Computing (SMC), Malaga, Spain.
Some of the things I have achieved during the years.