Benjamin Hayes

Benjamin Hayes is a research scientist at Sony Computer Science Laboratories Paris and a PhD candidate in Artificial Intelligence and Music at Queen Mary University of London's Centre for Digital Music (C4DM). His research focuses on neural audio synthesis, generative models, and perceptual aspects of sound design. He has held internships at Spotify, Sony CSL, and Bytedance, and previously worked as a music producer and lecturer in Electronic & Produced Music at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. His work bridges digital signal processing, deep learning, and creative sound exploration.

Education: PhD in AI and Music (Queen Mary University of London), Master’s/Undergraduate qualifications not explicitly stated but inferred from professional roles.

Research Interests: Neural audio synthesis, differentiable digital signal processing, timbre perception, generative models, and psychoacoustics. Current project explores perceptually motivated deep learning approaches for sound synthesis, emphasizing semantic associations in timbre.

Professional Experience: Over 10 years in music production, internships at leading tech firms, and academic collaborations across institutions like IRCAM, CNRS, and KTH.

Key Contributions: Developed frameworks for end-to-end sound synthesis, addressed challenges in unordered neural network targets, and pioneered gamified systems for crowdsourcing timbre semantics (e.g., timbre.fun). Active in conferences such as ICLR, ICASSP, and DMRN workshops.