Previous attempts at music artist classification use frame level audio features which summarize frequency content within short intervals of time. Comparatively, more recent music information retrieval tasks take advantage of temporal structure in audio spectrograms using deep convolutional and recurrent models. This paper revisits artist classification with this new framework and empirically explores the impacts of incorporating temporal structure in the feature representation. To this end, an established classification architecture, a Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN), is applied to the artist20 music artist identification dataset under a comprehensive set of conditions. These include audio clip length, which is a novel contribution in this work, and previously identified considerations such as dataset split and feature level. Our results improve upon baseline works, verify the influence of the producer effect on classification performance and demonstrate the trade-offs between audio length and training set size. The best performing model achieves an average F1 score of 0.937 across three independent trials which is a substantial improvement over the corresponding baseline under similar conditions. Additionally, to showcase the effectiveness of the CRNN's feature extraction capabilities, we visualize audio samples at the model's bottleneck layer demonstrating that learned representations segment into clusters belonging to their respective artists.
Electronic music artists and sound designers have unique workflow practices that necessitate specialized approaches for developing music information retrieval and creativity support tools. Furthermore, electronic music instruments, such as modular synthesizers, have near-infinite possibilities for sound creation and can be combined to create unique and complex audio paths. The process of discovering interesting sounds is often serendipitous and impossible to replicate. For this reason, many musicians in electronic genres record audio output at all times while they work in the studio. Subsequen…
This study focuses on the perception of music performances when contextual factors, such as room acoustics and instrument, change. We propose to distinguish the concept of "performance" from the one of "interpretation", which expresses the "artistic intention". Towards assessing this distinction, we carried out an experimental evaluation where 91 subjects were invited to listen to various audio recordings created by resynthesizing MIDI data obtained through Automatic Music Transcription (AMT) systems and a sensorized acoustic piano. During the resynthesis, we simulated different contexts and a…
Key Laboratory of Noise and Vibration Research, Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院声学研究所噪声与振动研究重点实验室）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；State Key Laboratory of Media Convergence and Communication, Communication University of China（中国传媒大学媒体融合与传播国家重点实验室）；School of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Guangzhou University（广州大学电子与通信工程学院）；National Environmental Protection Engineering and Technology Center for Road Traffic Noise Control（国家环境保护道路交通噪声控制工程技术中心）
With the development of deep neural networks, automatic music composition has made great progress. Although emotional music can evoke listeners' different emotions and it is important for artistic expression, only few researches have focused on generating emotional music. This paper presents EmotionBox -an music-element-driven emotional music generator that is capable of composing music given a specific emotion, where this model does not require a music dataset labeled with emotions. Instead, pitch histogram and note density are extracted as features that represent mode and tempo respectively …
Music Technology Group, Universitat Pompeu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学音乐技术组）；Joint Research Centre, European Commission（欧盟委员会联合研究中心）
Loops, seamlessly repeatable musical segments, are a cornerstone of modern music production. Contemporary artists often mix and match various sampled or pre-recorded loops based on musical criteria such as rhythm, harmony and timbral texture to create compositions. Taking such criteria into account, we present LoopNet, a feed-forward generative model for creating loops conditioned on intuitive parameters. We leverage Music Information Retrieval (MIR) models as well as a large collection of public loop samples in our study and use the Wave-U-Net architecture to map control parameters to audio. …
Deep learning has been demonstrated its effectiveness and efficiency in music genre classification. However, the existing achievements still have several shortcomings which impair the performance of this classification task. In this paper, we propose a hybrid architecture which consists of the paralleling CNN and Bi-RNN blocks. They focus on spatial features and temporal frame orders extraction respectively. Then the two outputs are fused into one powerful representation of musical signals and fed into softmax function for classification. The paralleling network guarantees the extracting featu…
Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences（马克斯·普朗克数学科学研究所）；Yandex（扬德克斯）
A new architecture of an artificial neural network that helps to generate longer melodic patterns is introduced alongside with methods for post-generation filtering. The proposed approach called variational autoencoder supported by history is based on a recurrent highway gated network combined with a variational autoencoder. Combination of this architecture with filtering heuristics allows generating pseudo-live acoustically pleasing and melodically diverse music.
There has been significant progress in the music generation technique utilizing deep learning. However, it is still hard for musicians and artists to use these techniques in their daily music-making practice. This paper proposes a Variational Autoencoder\cite{Kingma2014}(VAE)-based rhythm generation system, in which musicians can train a deep learning model only by selecting target MIDI files, then generate various rhythms with the model. The author has implemented the system as a plugin software for a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), namely a Max for Live device for Ableton Live. Selected pro…
Research Center for IT Innovation Academia Sinica Taipei, Taiwan
Convolutional neural networks with skip connections have shown good performance in music source separation. In this work, we propose a denoising Auto-encoder with Recurrent skip Connections (ARC). We use 1D convolution along the temporal axis of the time-frequency feature map in all layers of the fully-convolutional network. The use of 1D convolution makes it possible to apply recurrent layers to the intermediate outputs of the convolution layers. In addition, we also propose an enhancement network and a residual regression method to further improve the separation result. The recurrent skip co…
Memorial University of Newfoundland（纽芬兰纪念大学）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）
In this paper we present a method for algorithmic melody generation using a generative adversarial network without recurrent components. Music generation has been successfully done using recurrent neural networks, where the model learns sequence information that can help create authentic sounding melodies. Here, we use DC-GAN architecture with dilated convolutions and towers to capture sequential information as spatial image information, and learn long-range dependencies in fixed-length melody forms such as Irish traditional reel.
Computer Science and Engineering University of California, San Diego（加利福尼亚大学圣地亚哥分校计算机科学与工程学院）
Recent advances in deep neural networks have enabled algorithms to compose music that is comparable to music composed by humans. However, few algorithms allow the user to generate music with tunable parameters. The ability to tune properties of generated music will yield more practical benefits for aiding artists, filmmakers, and composers in their creative tasks. In this paper, we introduce DeepJ - an end-to-end generative model that is capable of composing music conditioned on a specific mixture of composer styles. Our innovations include methods to learn musical style and music dynamics. We…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
Imbalanced music genre classification is a crucial task in the Music Information Retrieval (MIR) field for identifying the long-tail, data-poor genre based on the related music audio segments, which is very prevalent in real-world scenarios. Most of the existing models are designed for class-balanced music datasets, resulting in poor performance in accuracy and generalization when identifying the music genres at the tail of the distribution. Inspired by the success of introducing Multi-instance Learning (MIL) in various classification tasks, we propose a novel mechanism named Multi-instance At…
This paper is about creating digital musical instruments where a predictive neural network model is integrated into the interactive system. Rather than predicting symbolic music (e.g., MIDI notes), we suggest that predicting future control data from the user and precise temporal information can lead to new and interesting interactive possibilities. We propose that a mixture density recurrent neural network (MDRNN) is an appropriate model for this task. The predictions can be used to fill-in control data when the user stops performing, or as a kind of filter on the user's own input. We present …
Algorithmic music composition is a way of composing musical pieces with minimal to no human intervention. While recurrent neural networks are traditionally applied to many sequence-to-sequence prediction tasks, including successful implementations of music composition, their standard supervised learning approach based on input-to-output mapping leads to a lack of note variety. These models can therefore be seen as potentially unsuitable for tasks such as music generation. Generative adversarial networks learn the generative distribution of data and lead to varied samples. This work implements …
The task of classifying emotions within a musical track has received widespread attention within the Music Information Retrieval (MIR) community. Music emotion recognition has traditionally relied on the use of acoustic features, verbal features, and metadata-based filtering. The role of musical prosody remains under-explored despite several studies demonstrating a strong connection between prosody and emotion. In this study, we restrict the input of traditional machine learning algorithms to the features of musical prosody. Furthermore, our proposed approach builds upon the prior by classifyi…
Our goal is to be able to build a generative model from a deep neural network architecture to try to create music that has both harmony and melody and is passable as music composed by humans. Previous work in music generation has mainly been focused on creating a single melody. More recent work on polyphonic music modeling, centered around time series probability density estimation, has met some partial success. In particular, there has been a lot of work based off of Recurrent Neural Networks combined with Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RNN-RBM) and other similar recurrent energy based models…
Music information retrieval is currently an active research area that addresses the extraction of musically important information from audio signals, and the applications of such information. The extracted information can be used for search and retrieval of music in recommendation systems, or to aid musicological studies or even in music learning. Sophisticated signal processing techniques are applied to convert low-level acoustic signal properties to musical attributes which are further embedded in a rule-based or statistical classification framework to link with high-level descriptions such …
Music that is generated by recurrent neural networks often lacks a sense of direction and coherence. We therefore propose a two-stage LSTM-based model for lead sheet generation, in which the harmonic and rhythmic templates of the song are produced first, after which, in a second stage, a sequence of melody notes is generated conditioned on these templates. A subjective listening test shows that our approach outperforms the baselines and increases perceived musical coherence.
Central Conservatory of Music（中央音乐学院）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
In natural language processing (NLP), the semantic similarity task requires large-scale, high-quality human-annotated labels for fine-tuning or evaluation. By contrast, in cases of music similarity, such labels are expensive to collect and largely dependent on the annotator's artistic preferences. Recent research has demonstrated that embedding calibration technique can greatly increase semantic similarity performance of the pre-trained language model without fine-tuning. However, it is yet unknown which calibration method is the best and how much performance improvement can be achieved. To ad…
Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；Kakao Corp.（Kakao公司）；Universitat Pompeu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学）
The automated recognition of music genres from audio information is a challenging problem, as genre labels are subjective and noisy. Artist labels are less subjective and less noisy, while certain artists may relate more strongly to certain genres. At the same time, at prediction time, it is not guaranteed that artist labels are available for a given audio segment. Therefore, in this work, we propose to apply the transfer learning framework, learning artist-related information which will be used at inference time for genre classification. We consider different types of artist-related informati…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）；NAVER Corp.（NAVER公司）
Supervised music representation learning has been performed mainly using semantic labels such as music genres. However, annotating music with semantic labels requires time and cost. In this work, we investigate the use of factual metadata such as artist, album, and track information, which are naturally annotated to songs, for supervised music representation learning. The results show that each of the metadata has individual concept characteristics, and using them jointly improves overall performance.
Automatically generating or captioning music playlist titles given a set of tracks is of significant interest in music streaming services as customized playlists are widely used in personalized music recommendation, and well-composed text titles attract users and help their music discovery. We present an encoder-decoder model that generates a playlist title from a sequence of music tracks. While previous work takes track IDs as tokenized input for playlist title generation, we use artist IDs corresponding to the tracks to mitigate the issue from the long-tail distribution of tracks included in…
We address the problem of disambiguating large scale catalogs through the definition of an unknown artist clustering task. We explore the use of metric learning techniques to learn artist embeddings directly from audio, and using a dedicated homonym artists dataset, we compare our method with a recent approach that learn similar embeddings using artist classifiers. While both systems have the ability to disambiguate unknown artists relying exclusively on audio, we show that our system is more suitable in the case when enough audio data is available for each artist in the train dataset. We also…
NAVER Corp.（NAVER公司）；Graduate School of Culture Technology, KAIST（韩国科学技术院文化技术研究生院）
In music domain, feature learning has been conducted mainly in two ways: unsupervised learning based on sparse representations or supervised learning by semantic labels such as music genre. However, finding discriminative features in an unsupervised way is challenging and supervised feature learning using semantic labels may involve noisy or expensive annotation. In this paper, we present a supervised feature learning approach using artist labels annotated in every single track as objective meta data. We propose two deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) to learn the deep artist features. O…
We explore the feasibility of using triplet neural networks to embed songs based on content-based music similarity. Our network is trained using triplets of songs such that two songs by the same artist are embedded closer to one another than to a third song by a different artist. We compare two models that are trained using different ways of picking this third song: at random vs. based on shared genre labels. Our experiments are conducted using songs from the Free Music Archive and use standard audio features. The initial results show that shallow Siamese networks can be used to embed music fo…
Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), Stanford University（斯坦福大学音乐与声学计算机研究中心）；Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（斯坦福人工智能实验室）；Design Program, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University（斯坦福大学机械工程系设计项目）
We propose a system that learns from artistic pairings of music and corresponding album cover art. The goal is to 'translate' paintings into music and, in further stages of development, the converse. We aim to deploy this system as an artistic tool for real time 'translations' between musicians and painters. The system's outputs serve as elements to be employed in a joint live performance of music and painting, or as generative material to be used by the artists as inspiration for their improvisation.
This paper introduces a novel recurrent model for music composition that is tailored to the structure of polyphonic music. We propose an efficient new conditional probabilistic factorization of musical scores, viewing a score as a collection of concurrent, coupled sequences: i.e. voices. To model the conditional distributions, we borrow ideas from both convolutional and recurrent neural models; we argue that these ideas are natural for capturing music's pitch invariances, temporal structure, and polyphony. We train models for single-voice and multi-voice composition on 2,300 scores from the Ke…
We present a model for capturing musical features and creating novel sequences of music, called the Convolutional Variational Recurrent Neural Network. To generate sequential data, the model uses an encoder-decoder architecture with latent probabilistic connections to capture the hidden structure of music. Using the sequence-to-sequence model, our generative model can exploit samples from a prior distribution and generate a longer sequence of music. We compare the performance of our proposed model with other types of Neural Networks using the criteria of Information Rate that is implemented by…
Artist similarity plays an important role in organizing, understanding, and subsequently, facilitating discovery in large collections of music. In this paper, we present a hybrid approach to computing similarity between artists using graph neural networks trained with triplet loss. The novelty of using a graph neural network architecture is to combine the topology of a graph of artist connections with content features to embed artists into a vector space that encodes similarity. To evaluate the proposed method, we compile the new OLGA dataset, which contains artist similarities from AllMusic, …
Clova AI Research（Clova人工智能研究院）；NAVER Corp.（NAVER公司）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Music highlights are valuable contents for music services. Most methods focused on low-level signal features. We propose a method for extracting highlights using high-level features from convolutional recurrent attention networks (CRAN). CRAN utilizes convolution and recurrent layers for sequential learning with an attention mechanism. The attention allows CRAN to capture significant snippets for distinguishing between genres, thus being used as a high-level feature. CRAN was evaluated on over 32,000 popular tracks in Korea for two months. Experimental results show our method outperforms three…
Using open-source and creative coding frameworks, a teamof artist-engineers from Portland Community College work-ing with artists who experience Intellectual/Developmentaldisabilities prototyped an ensemble of adapted instrumentsand synthesizers that facilitate real-time in-key collabora-tion. The instruments employ a variety of sensors, send-ing the resulting musical controls to software sound gener-ators via MIDI. Careful consideration was given to the bal-ance between freedom of expression, and curating the pos-sible sonic outcomes as adaptation. Evaluation of adaptedinstrument design may d…
Automatic generation of sequences has been a highly explored field in the last years. In particular, natural language processing and automatic music composition have gained importance due to the recent advances in machine learning and Neural Networks with intrinsic memory mechanisms such as Recurrent Neural Networks. This paper evaluates different types of memory mechanisms (memory cells) and analyses their performance in the field of music composition. The proposed approach considers music theory concepts such as transposition, and uses data transformations (embeddings) to introduce semantic …
Modern digital music production typically involves combining numerous acoustic elements to compile a piece of music. Important types of such elements are drum samples, which determine the characteristics of the percussive components of the piece. Artists must use their aesthetic judgement to assess whether a given drum sample fits the current musical context. However, selecting drum samples from a potentially large library is tedious and may interrupt the creative flow. In this work, we explore the automatic drum sample retrieval based on aesthetic principles learned from data. As a result, ar…
We describe a real-time system that receives a live audio stream from a jam session and generates lyric lines that are congruent with the live music being played. Two novel approaches are proposed to align the learned latent spaces of audio and text representations that allow the system to generate novel lyric lines matching live instrumental music. One approach is based on adversarial alignment of latent representations of audio and lyrics, while the other approach learns to transfer the topology from the music latent space to the lyric latent space. A user study with music artists using the …
Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；New York University（纽约大学）
We introduce a convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) for music tagging. CRNNs take advantage of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for local feature extraction and recurrent neural networks for temporal summarisation of the extracted features. We compare CRNN with three CNN structures that have been used for music tagging while controlling the number of parameters with respect to their performance and training time per sample. Overall, we found that CRNNs show a strong performance with respect to the number of parameter and training time, indicating the effectiveness of its hybrid st…
Acoustic environment characterization opens doors for sound reproduction innovations, smart EQing, speech enhancement, hearing aids, and forensics. Reverberation time, clarity, and direct-to-reverberant ratio are acoustic parameters that have been defined to describe reverberant environments. They are closely related to speech intelligibility and sound quality. As explained in the ISO3382 standard, they can be derived from a room measurement called the Room Impulse Response (RIR). However, measuring RIRs requires specific equipment and intrusive sound to be played. The recent audio combined wi…
