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Re: [AUDITORY] Query about Python software

Dear Kishore
  • I would agree with Richard on the learning curve and mind benders associated with R (For the rest of list members: similar to frustration with say, Supercollider), and it is not quite suited to what you want to be doing. As others have stated, Python is a great route for you not only to get up and running fast, but you will have access to a lot of audio/signal processing and machine learning libraries.
  • Personally, i've been fortunate to have been into C/C++ since high school (Note Matlab, Python, etc etc all are written using C/C++), so I am agnostic and can shift to any language, but I greatly benefitted with a week of face 2 face sessions with seasoned python professional geeks.
  • Please feel free to  message me offlist, so I can put you in touch with one of my ex-lab colleagues in Bangalore,  India, a python fanatic, who now works with the Internet Archive, and also wrote Infogami and Web.py with the late Aaron Swartz  (also creator of Reditt). They really saved me a lot of time, and are very good humans, benevolent with their time and intent.
  • FYI : Matlab (is not Free, and most academics use it through their university license/ and well, corporations too because they hire academics) has fast 'matrix' computation routines. However these days, python is equally if not much faster, and allows you to deploy algorithms on real world hardware. But you must in time also be adept at Matlab and switch to Python as the need to develop for real word prototypes arises.
End of the day, algorithms for signal processing and eventual machine learning, will have to be ported to run on embedded hardware (these days the mobile phone is emerging to be a great computer), with frameworks like TinyML. https://online-learning.harvard.edu/course/fundamentals-tinyml?delta=0

Regards
Sharath Chandra Ramakrishan

 




On Sat, Mar 6, 2021 at 11:41 PM Timothy Beechey <0000014613841c26-dmarc-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The different languages you mention are each based on different programming paradigms (e.g. object-oriented, functional, etc.). This is often a source of confusion and frustration when moving from one language to another. Dismissing a widely used language because it is different from what you are used to or expecting tends to offend people who use that language productively.

Tim

On Sat, Mar 6, 2021 at 12:48 AM Richard F. Lyon <dicklyon@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>   if you need proper statistics, R might be a better choice

I'm mostly a Matlab user for the last 30 years or so, but getting to be more comfortable with Python.  I had occasion to do a bit of R programming, and it was pretty horrible, with what seemed like a pretty irregular syntax and unpredictable set of idioms.  Don't go there.

Dick


On Thu, Mar 4, 2021 at 9:19 PM Krzysztof Basiński <k.basinski@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Dear Kishorekumar,

I'm a Python aficionado but I had spent a lot of time with different languages before settling in on Python (Java, C, JS, Ruby, R...). I can wholeheartedly recommend it for (what I guess) is your use case and in general as a first programming language to learn. Why?

1. Python is super easy to learn in comparison to other programming languages. It has an easy syntax and you don’t have to worry about a lot of technical things such as memory management, strict typing, garbage collection etc.

2. There are wonderful free resources, as others mentioned. I can recommend A Byte of Python as a starting point https://python.swaroopch.com.

3. Python Standard Library offers great solutions for common problems (such as file handling, http, json interfaces etc)

4. Python docs is something that you can actually read and understand. Same thing with error messages. These can be cryptic in other languages (like R!:)

5. There is the Jupyter ecosystem for interactive programming in Python. I know, I know, it supports other languages as well but Python Jupyter Kernels are really great (in comparison to R kernels for example). Also, Google Colab provides a free, interactive Python environment without the need to setup anything.

6. Most ML is done in Python and TensorFlow and PyTorch are industry standards.

7. Librosa (https://librosa.org) and Surfboard (https://github.com/novoic/surfboard) are great packages for audio feature extraction if you want to do that.

8. Python is fun! Try `import this` to see what I mean.


That said, Python can be kind of slow in some cases (though you can overcome this easily if you know what you’re doing). If you really need the speed, Julia promises to be as efficient and as fast as C. To be honest though, in 3+ years of working in Python the whole “Python is slow” thing didn’t really bother me. I would say it’s faster than R, at least in my use cases.

Also, if you need proper statistics, R might be a better choice. Statsmodels is the standard package for statistics in Python and you can do a lot with it. Unfortunately it can be a bit challenging and the docs are not so great. My current favourite for statistics in Python is Pingouin (https://pingouin-stats.org), though it is missing some stuff (no mixed models yet).

Best of luck,
Chris

--
Krzysztof Basiński, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology
Medical University of Gdańsk, Poland
http://mug.edu.pl | http://kbas.gumed.edu.pl

On 2 Mar 2021, at 09:50, kishorekumar Bharshetty <kumarbharshetty@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Dear all, 
I am Kishorekumar Bharshetty, Audiologist from India. I am currently working as an Clinical Audiologist at Amplifon India Pvt Ltd. 

I am curious to learn about Python software which is a language coding software, thinking that it will help me to set a base to learn more about Machine Learning technology. 

I wanted to know, whether learning Python software for an audiologist is a good idea? If yes, how can I be benefitted with this in future? 

Kindly, help me with this query. 


Thanks, and Regards
Kishorekumar Bharshetty
Audiologist
Amplifon India Pvt Ltd, India
+91-9663148361



--
Timothy Beechey, PhD
Postdoctoral Associate
Department of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences
215C Shevlin Hall, 164 Pillsbury Dr SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455
University of Minnesota


--
Sharath Chandra Ram

PhD Fellow @https://atec.utdallas.edu/

Machine Listening & Computational Media Art

Applied Cognition in HCI & Virtual Environments

Information, Media & Technology Policy

Alumni@Edinburgh School of Informatics
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