I am a PhD researcher in the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London where - as a member of the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in AI and Music - I am working on Audio Effects Modelling and Neural Synthesis of Sound Effects under the supervision of Joshua Reiss.
I was research assistant in the Audio Experience Design Lab at Imperial College London, working with Lorenzo Picinali on 3D audio and headphones acoustics.
I have a past as guitar amplifiers designer and project engineer for Blackstar Amps, where I had fun with high-voltage valve amps, low-voltage amps and pedals, as well as helping to model analogue circuits.
Back in Italy, I used to design and hand-build overdrive and distortion pedals as Mad Hatter Stompboxes
I hold a BEng in Computer Engineering and an MEng in Electronic Engineering from Sapienza University of Rome and an MSc in Sound and Music Computing from Queen Mary University of London.
Experience
Sony CSL - Paris
Research Intern
Deep Learning for Audio Signal Processing
April 2024 - July 2024
Queen Mary University of London
Postodoctoral Researcher
Deep Learning for Music Source Separation - in collaboration with AudioStrip
Jan 2024 - April 2024
Sony - Tokyo
Research Intern
Deep Learning for Generative Audio
Sep 2023 - Dec 2024
Imperial College London
Research Assistant
Binaural Audio Rendering. Interactive Soundscapes.
Nov 2017 - Jan 2021
Blackstar Amplification
Electronic Engineer and Project Engineer
Amps and Effects Design. Project Management.
Mar 2014 - Nov 2017
Mad Hatter Stompboxes
Founder | Owner | Electronic Engineer
Guitar Pedal Effects Design. Full Product Development.
Jan 2009 - Mar 2014
Education
Queen Mary University of London
PhD
Artificial Intelligence and Music
Queen Mary University of London
Master of Science
Sound and Music Computing
Sapienza University of Rome
Master of Engineering
Electronics Engineering
Sapienza University of Rome
Bachelor Degree
Computer Science
Publications
2025
Comunità M., Steinmetz C.J., Reiss J.D. "Differentiable Black-box and Gray-box Modeling of Nonlinear Audio Effects" - arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.14405.
Comunità M., Steinmetz C.J., Reiss J.D. "NablAFx: A Framework for Differentiable Black-box and Gray-box Modeling of Audio Effects" - arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.11668.
2024
Gramaccioni R.F., Marinoni C., Postolache E., Comunità M., Cosmo L., Reiss J.D., Comminiello D. "Stable-V2A: Synthesis of Synchronized Sound Effects with Temporal and Semantic Controls" - arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.15023.
Comunità, M., Reiss, J.D. "AFxResearch: a repository and website of audio effects research" - DMRN+ 19: Digital Music Research Network One-day Workshop 2024.
Steinmetz C.J., Singh S., Comunità M., Ibnyahya I., Yuan S., Benetos E., Reiss J.D."ST-ITO: Controlling Audio Effects for Style Transfer with Inference-Time Optimization" - International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference. ISMIR 2024.
- BEST PAPER AWARD -
Comunità, M., Zhong, Z., Takahashi, A., Yang, S., Zhao, M., Saito, K., Ikemiya, Y., Shibuya, T., Takahashi, S., Mitsufuji, Y."SpecMaskGIT: Masked Generative Modeling of Audio Spectrograms for Efficient Audio Synthesis and Beyond" - International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference. ISMIR 2024.
Comunità, M., Gramaccioni, R. F., Postolache, E., Rodolà, E., Comminiello, D., Reiss, J. D. "SyncFusion: Multimodal Onset-synchronized Video-to-Audio Foley Synthesis" - IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing. ICASSP 2024.
2023
Mitcheltree, C., Steinmetz, C. J., Comunità, M., Reiss, J. D. "Modulation Extraction for LFO-driven Audio Effects" - International Conference on Digital Audio Effects. DAFx 2023.
Comunità, M., Steinmetz, C. J., Phan, H., Reiss, J. D. "Modelling Black-box Audio Effects with Time-varying Feature Modulation" - IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing. ICASSP 2023.
2022
Colonel, J. T., Comunità, M., Reiss, J. D. "Reverse Engineering Memoryless Distortion Effects with Differentiable Waveshapers" - Audio Engineering Society Convention 153. October, 2022.
- BEST STUDENT PAPER AWARD -
Comunità, M., Gerino, A., Picinali, L. "PlugSonic: a Web-and Mobile-based Platform for Dynamic and Navigable Binaural Audio" - EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing. 18 (2022). 2022.
Comunità, M., Phan, H., Reiss, J. D. "Neural Synthesis of Footsteps Sound Effects with Generative Adversarial Networks" - Audio Engineering Society Convention 152. May, 2022.
2021
Comunità, M., Stowell, D., Reiss, J. D. "Guitar Effects Recognition and Parameter Estimation with Convolutional Neural Networks" - Journal of the Audio Engineering Society. 69(7/8), 594-604. 2021.
Comunità, M., Gerino, A., Lim, V., Picinali, L. "Design and Evaluation of a Web-and Mobile-Based Binaural Audio Platform for Cultural Heritage" - Applied Sciences. 11(4), 1540. 2021.
2020
Comunità, M., Gerino, A., Lim, V., Picinali, L. "PlugSonic: a Web- and Mobile-based Platform for Binaural Audio and Sonic Narratives" - arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.04638
2019
Comunità, M. and Picinali, L. "Estimating Ear Canal Volume through Electrical Impedance Measurements from In-Ear Headphones — Initial Results" - Audio Engineering Society International Conference on Headphone Technology. August, 2019.
Comunità, M., Gerino, A., Lim, V., Picinali, L. "Web-based Binaural Audio and Sonic Narratives for Cultural Heritage" - Audio Engineering Society International Conference on Immersive and Interactive Audio. March, 2019.
Awards
Best Paper Award - ISMIR 2024
for "ST-ITO: Controlling Audio Effects for Style Transfer with Inference-Time Optimization"
Best Student Paper Award - AES Convention 2022
for "Reverse Engineering Memoryless Distortion Effects with Differentiable Waveshapers"
Best Reviewer Award - DAFx 2021
UKRI Scholarship - Centre for Doctoral Training in Artificial Intelligence and Music (AIM) - 2019
Total Guitar Award
for Blackstar Artist Series amplifiers
Guitarist Choice Award
for Blackstar Artist Series amplifiers
Academic Service
Reviewer
International Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFx) - 2020, 2021, 2023, 2024
EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing - 2022, 2023, 2024
IEEE Signal Processing Letters - 2023