| Judy Brown | |
| Birth Place: | Teague, Texas |
| Fields: | Physics Signal processing Bioacoustics |
| Work Institution: | Centre d'Etudes Nucleaires de Saclay Wellesley College MIT |
| Alma Mater: | Rice University University of California, Berkeley |
| Known For: | Constant-Q transform |
Judith "Judy" C. Brown is an American physicist and professor emerita at Wellesley College.[1] She was a visiting scientist at the MIT Media Lab in the Machine Listening Group for over 20 years, and is recognized for her contributions in music information retrieval, including developing the constant-Q transform.[2] [3] She is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) and has served on the ASA technical committees for musical acoustics and animal bioacoustics.[1]
Brown was born in Teague, Texas and attended Rice University for her bachelor's degree in chemistry.[4] She attended the University of California, Berkeley for her PhD and then spent three years as a postdoctoral fellow in solid state physics at the Centre d'Etudes Nucleaires de Saclay.[2] She then joined the faculty in the physics department at Wellesley College, where she taught the first quantum mechanics course at Wellesley.[1] She joined the MIT Media Lab as a visiting scientist in 1986 to conduct research on computer perception of music and developed classification algorithms for marine mammal sounds.[2] She was elected a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America in 1999 for her contributions in applying signal processing to musical acoustics, frequency tracking, instrument identification, and spectral analysis.[5] She retired in 2005.[1]