#nowplaying the future billboard

The field of Music Information Retrieval is still very immature although it has been addressed by a substantial number of research projects over past three decades. Many problems are faced in music information retrieval due to the nature of music itself. In this paper, the basic representation of audio and video are discussed along with the challenges of music retrieval. The need for music information is discussed using the statistical survey. The paper challenges the common assumption that searching on the pitch alone is satisfactory and discusses the other features which can aid in searching. This assumption may indeed be right for monophonic music but it is insufficient for polyphonic music. Even in monophonic music the possibility of faulty results can’t be ignored.

It is frequently presumed that lovers of Classical music are not present in social media. In this paper, we investigate whether this statement can be empirically verified. To this end, we compare two social media platforms --- Last.fm and Twitter --- and perform a study on musical preference of their respective users. We investigate two research hypotheses: (i) Classical music fan are more reluctant to use social media to indicate their listing habits than listeners of other genres and (ii) there are correlations between the use of Last.fm and Twitter to indicate music listening behavior. Both hypotheses are verified and substantial differences could be made out for Twitter users. The results of these investigations will help improve music recommendation systems for listeners with non-mainstream music taste.

Melody extraction from polyphonic audio, which consists of number of different instruments, is one of the most challenging tasks in the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR). This paper aims at implementation of extracting melody using two-way mismatch dual pitch tracking (TWMDPT) and harmonic cluster tracking (HCT) algorithms. In this work, melody of singing voice is estimated in presence of multi-accompaniment. In the first method temporal features of voice harmonics are used to find the voice pitch and it is based on salience function. The second method depends upon strong higher harmonics for robustness against distortion by the first harmonic due to low frequency accompaniments. Performance of these algorithms is evaluated on MIR-1k database and accuracy is estimated using Raw Pitch Accuracy (RPA), Raw Chroma Accuracy (RCA) and timbre feature.

A frequent problem when dealing with audio classification tasks is the scarcity of suitable training data. This work investigates ways of mitigating this problem by applying transfer learning techniques to neural network architectures for several classification tasks from the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR). First, three state-of-the-art architectures are trained and evaluated with several datasets for the task of speech/music classification. Second, feature representations or embeddings are extracted from the trained networks to classify new tasks with unseen data. The effect of pre-training with respect to the similarity of the source and target tasks are investigated in the context of transfer learning, as well as different fine-tuning strategies.

There are two important research topics in the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR). One is how to improve the robustness of features and the other is how to speed up the retrieval process. This paper improved the algorithms which proposed by Shazam company in these two aspects. We improve the robustness of the system by a new audio finger-printing extraction using computer graphics, and the system can recognize the recordings which get in complex environment accurately. On the other hand, we propose a recursive search algorithm based on the confidence measure to improve the retrieval speed. Quantitative analysis of the opposite experiment verifies the improvement in the retrieval speed and accuracy.

Technology has developed a lot over the last decades and has made a profound impact in almost every field. The field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) has not been an exception to this as well, one of its most promising applications being Automatic Music Transcription (AMT). It is important to identify the active regions of various Instruments in a piece before transcription and the challenge elevates even more when the audio clips are contaminated with noise. MISNA (Musical Instrument Segregation from Noisy Clips) is a system proposed towards the identification of isolated Instruments from noisy clips which can aid towards AMT in noisy environments. The system works using statistical features (LPCC-S) derived from raw Linear Predictive Cepstral Coefficient values on very short clips of lengths 1 and 2 seconds. The system has been tested for various SNR scenarios and highest accuracies of 98.63% and 97.42% for Individual Instruments and Instrument Family identification has been obtained with the aid of Extreme Learning based classifier for a highest of 2626 clips.

Music is a complicated form of communication, where creators and cultures communicate and expose their individualities. Thanks to music digitalization, recommendation systems and other online services have become indispensable in the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR). Classification of music is essential for music recommendation systems. In this paper, we propose an approach for finding similarity between music. Our approach is based on mid-level attributes like pitch, midi value, interval, contour, and duration, and applying text-based classification techniques. Performance evaluation has been done using the accuracy score of scikit-learn. As a preliminary study, our system first predicted jazz, metal, and ragtime for western music. The genre prediction system has been tested on 476 music files with a maximum accuracy of 95.8% across different n-grams. Then, we have analyzed and classified the Indian classical Carnatic music based on their raga. Our system has predicted Sankarabharam, Mohanam, and Sindhubhairavi ragas. The raga prediction system was tested on 68 music files with a maximum accuracy of 90.14% across different n-grams.

In this paper, we propose a unified approach to fast index-based music recognition. As an important area within the field of music information retrieval (MIR), the goal of music recognition is, given a database of musical pieces and a query document, to locate all occurrences of that document within the database, up to certain possible errors. In particular, the identification of the query with regard to the database becomes possible. The approach presented in this paper is based on a general algorithmic framework for searching complex patterns of objects in large databases. We describe how this approach may be applied to two important music recognition tasks: The polyphonic (musical score-based) search in polyphonic score data and the identification of pulse-code modulation audio material from a given acoustic waveform. We give an overview on the various aspects of our technology including fault-tolerant search methods. Several areas of application are suggested. We describe several prototypic systems we have developed for those applications including the notify! and the audentify! systems for score- and waveform-based music recognition, respectively.

Classification of musical audio signals according to expressed mood or emotion has evident applications to content-based music retrieval in large databases. Wrapper selection is a dimension reduction method that has been proposed for improving classification performance. However, the technique is prone to lead to overfitting of the training data, which decreases the generalizability of the obtained results. We claim that previous attempts to apply wrapper selection in the field of music information retrieval (MIR) have led to disputable conclusions about the used methods due to inadequate analysis frameworks, indicative of overfitting, and biased results. This paper presents a framework based on cross-indexing for obtaining realistic performance estimate of wrapper selection by taking into account the simplicity and generalizability of the classification models. The framework is applied on sets of film soundtrack excerpts that are consensually associated with particular basic emotions, comparing Naive Bayes, k-NN, and SVM classifiers using both forward selection (FS) and backward elimination (BE). K-NN with BE yields the most promising results—56.5% accuracy with only four features. The most useful feature subset for k-NN contains mode majorness and key clarity, combined with dynamical, rhythmical, and structural features.

Genetic algorithms have been introduced to the field of media segmentation including image, video, and also music segmentation since segmentation problems usually have complex fitness landscapes. Music segmentation can provide insight into the structure of a music composition so it is an important task in music information retrieval (MIR). The authors have already presented the application of genetic algorithms for the music segmentation problem in an earlier paper. This paper focuses on the optimization of parameter settings for genetic algorithms in the field of MIR as well as on the comparison of their results.

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in modeling user behaviors in multimedia research, emphasizing the need to consider human factors such as preference, activity, and emotion in system development and evaluation. Following this research line, we present in this paper the LiveJournal two-million post (LJ2M) dataset to foster research on user-centered music information retrieval. The new dataset is characterized by the great diversity of real-life listening contexts where people and music interact. It contains blog articles from the social blogging website LiveJournal, along with tags self-reporting a user's emotional state while posting and the musical track that the user considered as the best match for the post. More importantly, the data are contributed by users spontaneously in their daily lives, instead of being collected in a controlled environment. Therefore, it offers new opportunities to understand the interrelationship among the personal, situational, and musical factors of music listening. As an example application, we present research investigating the interaction between the affective context of the listener and the affective content of music, using audio-based music emotion recognition techniques and a psycholinguistic tool. The study offers insights into the role of music in mood regulation and demonstrates how LJ2M can contribute to studies on real-world music listening behavior.

The goal was to assess risky and protective listening behaviors of adolescent users of MP3 players and the association of these behaviors with demographic characteristics and frequency of use. In 2007, 1687 adolescents (12-19 years of age) in 68 classes in 15 Dutch secondary schools were invited to complete questionnaires about their music-listening behaviors. . Ninety percent of participants reported listening to music through earphones on MP3 players; 32.8% were frequent users, 48.0% used high volume settings, and only 6.8% always or nearly always used a noise-limiter. Frequent users were >4 times more likely to listen to high-volume music than were infrequent users, and adolescents in practical prevocational schools were more than twice as likely to listen to high-volume music as were those attending preuniversity education. When using MP3 players, adolescents are very likely to engage in risky listening behaviors and are unlikely to seek protection. Frequent MP3 player use is an indicator of other risky listening behaviors, such as listening at high volumes and failing to use noise-limiters.

In the audio domain, the disciplines of signal processing, machine learning, psychoacoustics, information theory and library science have merged into the field of Music Information Retrieval (Music-IR). Music-IR researchers attempt to extract high level information from music like pitch, meter, genre, rhythm and timbre directly from audio signals as well as semantic meta-data over a wide variety of sources. This information is then used to organize and process data for large scale retrieval and novel interfaces. For creating musical content, access to hardware and software tools for producing music has become commonplace in the digital landscape. While the means to produce music have become widely available, significant time must be invested to attain professional results. Mixing multi-channel audio requires techniques and training far beyond the knowledge of the average music software user. As a result, there is significant growth and development in intelligent signal processing for audio, an emergent field combining audio signal processing and machine learning for producing music. This work focuses on methods for modeling and analyzing multi-timbral musical instrument mixtures and performing automated processing techniques to improve audio quality based on quantitative and qualitative measures. The main contributions of the work involve training models to predict mixing parameters for multi-channel audio sources and developing new methods to model the component interactions of individual timbres to an overall mixture. Linear dynamical systems (LDS) are shown to be capable of learning the relative contributions of individual instruments to re-create a commercial recording based on acoustic features extracted directly from audio. Variations in the model topology are explored to make it applicable to a more diverse range of input sources and improve performance. An exploration of relevant features for modeling timbre and identifying instruments is performed. Using various basis decomposition techniques, audio examples are reconstructed and analyzed in a perceptual listening test to evaluate their ability to capture salient aspects of timbre. These tests show that a 2-D decomposition is able to capture much more perceptually relevant information with regard to the temporal evolution of the frequency spectrum of a set of audio examples. The results indicate that joint modeling of frequencies and their evolution is essential for capturing higher level concepts in audio that we desire to leverage in automated systems.

Music Genre Classification (MGC) automatically categorizes music into different genres based on various musical attributes and features in a small number of music files. This is a crucial problem in the field of music information retrieval as it provides a way to organize and analyse large amounts of music files. MGC can be performed using conventional machine learning algorithms such as SVM, k-nearest neighbours, Decision trees, and neural networks. These algorithms learn to recognize different musical features and attributes to categorize the music files into different genres. The literature shows that the performance of conventional machine learning algorithms is inferior to deep learning algorithms such as CNN, RNN, etc., in various applications. Hence, the CNN algorithm is adapted to implement the classification of music files. This aims to classify music genres using CNN deep learning techniques. The performance of the algorithms for MGC can be evaluated using metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. Additionally, the impact of different features and algorithms on the performance of MGC can be studied and compared. It has applications in areas such as automated music recommendation systems, music education, and music production. An accuracy of 83% is achieved by using CNN to accomplish the task of MGC.

Emotion recognition of music objects is a promising and important research issues in the field of music information retrieval. Usually, music emotion recognition could be considered as a training/classification problem. However, even given a benchmark (a training data with ground truth) and using effective classification algorithms, music emotion recognition remains a challenging problem. Most previous relevant work focuses only on acoustic music content without considering individual difference (i.e., personalization issues). In addition, assessment of emotions is usually self-reported (e.g., emotion tags) which might introduce inaccuracy and inconsistency. Electroencephalography (EEG) is a non-invasive brain-machine interface which allows external machines to sense neurophysiological signals from the brain without surgery. Such unintrusive EEG signals, captured from the central nervous system, have been utilized for exploring emotions. This paper proposes an evidence-based and personalized model for music emotion recognition. In the training phase for model construction and personalized adaption, based on the IADS (the International Affective Digitized Sound system, a set of acoustic emotional stimuli for experimental investigations of emotion and attention), we construct two predictive and generic models \(AN\!N_1\) (“EEG recordings of standardized group vs. emotions”) and \(AN\!N_2\) (“music audio content vs. emotion”). Both models are trained by an artificial neural network. We then collect a subject’s EEG recordings when listening the selected IADS samples, and apply the \(AN\!N_1\) to determine the subject’s emotion vector. With the generic model and the corresponding individual differences, we construct the personalized model H by the projective transformation. In the testing phase, given a music object, the processing steps are: (1) to extract features from the music audio content, (2) to apply \(AN\!N_2\) to calculate the vector in the arousal-valence emotion space, and (3) to apply the transformation matrix H to determine the personalized emotion vector. Moreover, with respect to a moderate music object, we apply a sliding window on the music object to obtain a sequence of personalized emotion vectors, in which those predicted vectors will be fitted and organized as an emotion trail for revealing dynamics in the affective content of music object. Experimental results suggest the proposed approach is effective.