Vesa Välimäki

Vesa Välimäki's research focuses on digital signal processing and machine learning applied to audio, acoustics, and music technology. His work is associated with ICT (Information and Communications Technology) and the digitalization of the world. He is the Vice Dean for Research and the Head of the Doctoral Programme at the Aalto University School of Electrical Engineering. His research team, the Audio Signal Processing Research Group, belongs to the Aalto Acoustics Lab, a multidisciplinary center of high competence with excellent facilities for sound-related research. His research group was part of the Nordic University Hub project NordicSMC (Sound and Music Computing), which was funded by NordForsk in 2018–2023.

Prof. Välimäki is a Fellow of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), a Fellow of the AES (Audio Engineering Society), and a Fellow of the AAIA (Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association). He was a Senior Area Editor of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing in 2015-2020. He has arranged several special issues for international scientific journals, such as the Applied Sciences (in 2016, 2017, and 2020) and the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (2015 and 2019). He was the General Chair of the 14th Sound and Music Computing Conference SMC-17, which was held on the Otaniemi campus of Aalto University (Espoo, Finland) in July 2017. He was a Board Member of the Heureka Science Centre from 2016 to 2025. Prof. Välimäki was the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society from 2020 to 2025, and is now the Deputy Editor-in-Chief.

Current research interests include

• Artificial reverberation
• Audio filter design (equalizers, delay filters, phase processing)
• Deep learning for musical audio processing
• Headphone and loudspeaker signal processing
• Virtual analog modeling for music technology