Vesa Välimäki

Timeline

1. 1992–1995

   Doctorate in Helsinki

   He earns a Master of Science in Technology in 1992, a Licentiate of Science in Technology in 1994 and a Doctor of Science in Technology in 1995 at Helsinki University of Technology. His doctoral thesis deals with fractional delay filters and the discrete-time simulation of acoustic tubes for sound synthesis.

2. 1996–2002

   Senior assistant and Pori professor

   In 1996, he is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Westminster in London, where he develops digital signal processing algorithms that employ nonuniform sampling. From 1996 until 2001, he holds the post of senior assistant in acoustics and audio signal processing at Helsinki University of Technology, and in the academic year 2001–2002 he is professor of signal processing at the Pori School of Technology and Economics of Tampere University of Technology.

3. 2002–2009

   Professor of audio signal processing

   He becomes professor of audio signal processing in 2002. In the academic year 2008–2009, he is on leave as a senior researcher under an Academy of Finland grant and spends part of the year as a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics.

4. 2012–2015

   AES and IEEE Fellowships

   He becomes a Fellow of the Audio Engineering Society in 2012. In 2014, the IEEE elevates him to Fellow, effective from 2015, with the citation “for contributions to synthesis and processing of audio signals”.

5. 2019

   Deep learning for distortion circuits

   In 2019, he, Eero-Pekka Damskägg and Lauri Juvela receive the first Best Paper Award at the Sound and Music Computing Conference in Málaga for “Real-Time Modeling of Audio Distortion Circuits with Deep Learning”. At DAFx-2019 in Birmingham, he, Alec Wright and Damskägg present recurrent neural networks for black-box modelling of tube amplifiers and distortion pedals, which reach similar accuracy to a WaveNet-style network with significantly less processing power.

6. 2022–2023

   Audio diffusion and an AAIA Fellowship

   In 2022, he coauthors CQT-Diff with Eloi Moliner and Jaakko Lehtinen, a neural diffusion model for audio inverse problems such as bandwidth extension, inpainting and declipping, and Moliner receives the Best Student Paper Award for it at ICASSP 2023. In 2023, he, Gloria Dal Santo, Karolina Prawda and Sebastian Schlecht win the Best Paper Award at DAFx-23 for “Differentiable Feedback Delay Network for Colorless Reverberation”. In October 2023, the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association names him a Fellow for outstanding achievements in signal processing and machine learning.

7. 2025–2026

   DAFx best paper awards

   In 2025, a team he leads, with Roope Salmi, Stefan Bilbao, Sebastian Schlecht and David Zicarelli, wins the Third Best Paper Award at DAFx 2025 in Ancona for a method that transforms long audio recordings by removing phase information. In 2026, he, Gloria Dal Santo, Xiaojie Pi, Karolina Prawda and Sebastian Schlecht win the best paper award at DAFx 2026 at MIT for “Shimmer Reverberation with Nonlinear Feedback Delay Networks”.

8. As of October 2026

   Aalto professor and journal editor

   He is a professor in the Department of Information and Communications Engineering at Aalto University, where his research focuses on digital signal processing and machine learning for audio, acoustics and music technology. He leads the Audio Signal Processing Research Group of the Aalto Acoustics Lab and is Vice Dean for Research and Head of the Doctoral Programme at the School of Electrical Engineering. From 2020 to 2025, he is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, and he is now its Deputy Editor-in-Chief.