Modelling human perception of musical similarity is critical for the evaluation of generative music systems, musicological research, and many Music Information Retrieval tasks. Although human similarity judgments are the gold standard, computational analysis is often preferable, since results are often easier to reproduce, and computational methods are much more scalable. Moreover, computation based approaches can be calculated quickly and on demand, which is a prerequisite for use with an online system. We propose StyleRank, a method to measure the similarity between a MIDI file and an arbitrary musical style delineated by a collection of MIDI files. MIDI files are encoded using a novel set of features and an embedding is learned using Random Forests. Experimental evidence demonstrates that StyleRank is highly correlated with human perception of stylistic similarity, and that it is precise enough to rank generated samples based on their similarity to the style of a corpus. In addition, similarity can be measured with respect to a single feature, allowing specific discrepancies between generated samples and a particular musical style to be identified.
Musical instrument classification is one of the focuses of Music Information Retrieval (MIR). In order to solve the problem of poor performance of current musical instrument classification models, we propose a musical instrument classification algorithm based on multi-channel feature fusion and XGBoost. Based on audio feature extraction and fusion of the dataset, the features are input into the XGBoost model for training; secondly, we verified the superior performance of the algorithm in the musical instrument classification task by com-paring different feature combinations and several classic…
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 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. …
INESC TEC；University of Porto（波尔图大学）；Universitat Pompeu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学）；University of Coimbra（科英布拉大学）；CISUC；Music Technology Group（音乐技术组）
In this paper, we present TIV.lib, an open-source library for the content-based tonal description of musical audio signals. Its main novelty relies on the perceptually-inspired Tonal Interval Vector space based on the Discrete Fourier transform, from which multiple instantaneous and global representations, descriptors and metrics are computed - e.g., harmonic change, dissonance, diatonicity, and musical key. The library is cross-platform, implemented in Python and the graphical programming language Pure Data, and can be used in both online and offline scenarios. Of note is its potential for en…
Deep learning-based approaches to musical source separation are often limited to the instrument classes that the models are trained on and do not generalize to separate unseen instruments. To address this, we propose a few-shot musical source separation paradigm. We condition a generic U-Net source separation model using few audio examples of the target instrument. We train a few-shot conditioning encoder jointly with the U-Net to encode the audio examples into a conditioning vector to configure the U-Net via feature-wise linear modulation (FiLM). We evaluate the trained models on real musical…
This technical report gives a detailed, formal description of the features introduced in the paper: Adrien Ycart, Lele Liu, Emmanouil Benetos and Marcus T. Pearce. "Investigating the Perceptual Validity of Evaluation Metrics for Automatic Piano Music Transcription", Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (TISMIR), Accepted, 2020.
In the task of generating music, the art factor plays a big role and is a great challenge for AI. Previous work involving adversarial training to produce new music pieces and modeling the compatibility of variety in music (beats, tempo, musical stems) demonstrated great examples of learning this task. Though this was limited to generating mashups or learning features from tempo and key distributions to produce similar patterns. Compound Word Transformer was able to represent music generation task as a sequence generation challenge involving musical events defined by compound words. These music…
This paper focuses on the modeling of musical melodies as networks. Notes of a melody can be treated as nodes of a network. Connections are created whenever notes are played in sequence. We analyze some main tracks coming from different music genres, with melodies played using different musical instruments. We find out that the considered networks are, in general, scale free networks and exhibit the small world property. We measure the main metrics and assess whether these networks can be considered as formed by sub-communities. Outcomes confirm that peculiar features of the tracks can be extr…
Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Nanjing University（南京大学）；Microsoft Azure Speech（微软Azure语音部门）
Human usually composes music by organizing elements according to the musical form to express music ideas. However, for neural network-based music generation, it is difficult to do so due to the lack of labelled data on musical form. In this paper, we develop MeloForm, a system that generates melody with musical form using expert systems and neural networks. Specifically, 1) we design an expert system to generate a melody by developing musical elements from motifs to phrases then to sections with repetitions and variations according to pre-given musical form; 2) considering the generated melody…
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…
LIP6, Université Pierre et Marie Curie（皮埃尔和玛丽·居里大学 LIP6 实验室）；Sony CSL, Paris（索尼计算机科学实验室（巴黎））；École Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France（巴黎综合理工学院）；Sony CSL, Tokyo（索尼计算机科学实验室（东京））
Distances on symbolic musical sequences are needed for a variety of applications, from music retrieval to automatic music generation. These musical sequences belong to a given corpus (or style) and it is obvious that a good distance on musical sequences should take this information into account; being able to define a distance ex nihilo which could be applicable to all music styles seems implausible. A distance could also be invariant under some transformations, such as transpositions, so that it can be used as a distance between musical motives rather than musical sequences. However, to our k…
National Institute of Technology, Durgapur（杜尔加布尔国家理工学院）；Indian Institute of Science（印度科学学院）；Steradian Semiconductors Pvt. Ltd.（斯特拉迪安半导体私人有限公司）
Musical Instrument Identification has for long had a reputation of being one of the most ill-posed problems in the field of Musical Information Retrieval(MIR). Despite several robust attempts to solve the problem, a timeline spanning over the last five odd decades, the problem remains an open conundrum. In this work, the authors take on a further complex version of the traditional problem statement. They attempt to solve the problem with minimal data available - one audio excerpt per class. We propose to use a convolutional Siamese network and a residual variant of the same to identify musical…
RoboJam is a machine-learning system for generating music that assists users of a touchscreen music app by performing responses to their short improvisations. This system uses a recurrent artificial neural network to generate sequences of touchscreen interactions and absolute timings, rather than high-level musical notes. To accomplish this, RoboJam's network uses a mixture density layer to predict appropriate touch interaction locations in space and time. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of RoboJam's network and how it has been integrated into a touchscreen music app. …
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur（印度理工学院克勒格布尔分校）；Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata（印度统计研究所加尔各答分所）
This work aims to examine one of the cornerstone problems of Musical Instrument Retrieval (MIR), in particular, instrument classification. IRMAS (Instrument recognition in Musical Audio Signals) data set is chosen for this purpose. The data includes musical clips recorded from various sources in the last century, thus having a wide variety of audio quality. We have presented a very concise summary of past work in this domain. Having implemented various supervised learning algorithms for this classification task, SVM classifier has outperformed the other state-of-the-art models with an accuracy…
Musical pieces can be modeled as complex networks. This fosters innovative ways to categorize music, paving the way towards novel applications in multimedia domains, such as music didactics, multimedia entertainment and digital music generation. Clustering these networks through their main metrics allows grouping similar musical tracks. To show the viability of the approach, we provide results on a dataset of guitar solos.
Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University（京都大学信息学研究生院）；The Hakubi Center for Advanced Research, Kyoto University（京都大学白眉高级研究中心）；AIP Center for Advanced Intelligence Project, RIKEN（理化学研究所高级智能项目AIP中心）
Most work on musical score models (a.k.a. musical language models) for music transcription has focused on describing the local sequential dependence of notes in musical scores and failed to capture their global repetitive structure, which can be a useful guide for transcribing music. Focusing on rhythm, we formulate several classes of Bayesian Markov models of musical scores that describe repetitions indirectly using the sparse transition probabilities of notes or note patterns. This enables us to construct piece-specific models for unseen scores with an unfixed repetitive structure and to der…
We present a novel framework for generating pop music. Our model is a hierarchical Recurrent Neural Network, where the layers and the structure of the hierarchy encode our prior knowledge about how pop music is composed. In particular, the bottom layers generate the melody, while the higher levels produce the drums and chords. We conduct several human studies that show strong preference of our generated music over that produced by the recent method by Google. We additionally show two applications of our framework: neural dancing and karaoke, as well as neural story singing.
Notes in a musical piece are building blocks employed in non-random ways to create melodies. It is the "interaction" among a limited amount of notes that allows constructing the variety of musical compositions that have been written in centuries and within different cultures. Networks are a modeling tool that is commonly employed to represent a set of entities interacting in some way. Thus, notes composing a melody can be seen as nodes of a network that are connected whenever these are played in sequence. The outcome of such a process results in a directed graph. By using complex network theor…
Raga is a central musical concept in South Asia, especially India, and we investigate connections between Western classical music and Melakarta raga that is a raga in Karnatak (south Indian) classical music, through musical icosahedron. In our previous study, we introduced some kinds of musical icosahedra connecting various musical concepts in Western music: chromatic/whole tone musical icosahedra, Pythagorean/whole tone musical icosahedra, and exceptional musical icosahedra. In this paper, first, we introduce kinds of musical icosahedra that connect the above musical icosahedra through two ki…
We propose a new way of analyzing musical pieces by using the exceptional musical icosahedra where all the major/minor triads are represented by golden triangles or golden gnomons. First, we introduce a concept of the golden neighborhood that characterizes golden triangles/gnomons that neighbor a given golden triangle or gnomon. Then, we investigate a relation between the exceptional musical icosahedra and the neo-Riemannian theory, and find that the golden neighborhoods and the icosahedron symmetry relate any major/minor triad with any major/minor triad. Second, we show how the exceptional mu…
In the previous articles of this series, we have discussed the development of musical scales particularly that of the heptatonic scale which forms the basis of Western classical music today. In this last article, we take a look at the basic structure of scales used in Indian classical music and how different `raga's are generated through the simple process of scale shifting.
In the Pacific Coast of Colombia there is a type of marimba called marimba de chonta, which provides the melodic and harmonic contour for traditional music with characteristic chants and dances. The tunings of this marimba are based on the voice of female singers and allows musical practices, as a transposition that preserves relative distances between bars. Here we show that traditional tunings are consistent with isotonic scales, and that they have changed in the last three decades due to the influence of Western music. Specifically, low octaves have changed into just octaves. Additionally, …
Institute of Computational Perception, Johannes Kepler University Linz（约翰内斯·开普勒林茨大学计算感知研究所）
This demo paper introduces partitura, a Python package for handling symbolic musical information. The principal aim of this package is to handle richly structured musical information as conveyed by modern staff music notation. It provides a much wider range of possibilities to deal with music than the more reductive (but very common) piano roll-oriented approach inspired by the MIDI standard. The package is an open source project and is available on GitHub.
Adopting a performer-centric perspective, we frequently encounter two statements: "music flows", and "music is life-like". This dissertation builds on top of the two statements above, resulting in an exploration of the role of temporal asymmetry in music (generalizing "music flows") and its relation to the idea of organicism (generalizing "music is life-like"). We focus on two aspects of temporal asymmetry. The first aspect concerns the vastly different epistemic mechanisms with which we obtain knowledge of the past and the future. A particular musical consequence follows: recurrence. The epis…
Research Center for IT Innovation, Academia Sinica（中央研究院资讯科技创新研究中心）；KKBOX Inc.（KKBOX公司）
Music creation involves not only composing the different parts (e.g., melody, chords) of a musical work but also arranging/selecting the instruments to play the different parts. While the former has received increasing attention, the latter has not been much investigated. This paper presents, to the best of our knowledge, the first deep learning models for rearranging music of arbitrary genres. Specifically, we build encoders and decoders that take a piece of polyphonic musical audio as input and predict as output its musical score. We investigate disentanglement techniques such as adversarial…
The conception and design of new musical interfaces is a multidisciplinary area that tightly relates technology and artistic creation. In this paper, the author first exposes some of the questions he has posed himself during more than a decade experience as a performer, composer, interface and software designer, and educator. Finally, he illustrates these topics with some examples of his work.
IRIT（图卢兹计算机科学研究所）；Université de Toulouse（图卢兹大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）
State-of-the-art music recommendation systems are based on collaborative filtering, which predicts a user's interest from his listening habits and similarities with other users' profiles. These approaches are agnostic to the song content, and therefore face the cold-start problem: they cannot recommend novel songs without listening history. To tackle this issue, content-aware recommendation incorporates information about the songs that can be used for recommending new items. Most methods falling in this category exploit either user-annotated tags, acoustic features or deeply-learned features. …
Ircam — Centre Pompidou（巴黎蓬皮杜中心声学/音乐研究与协作学院（IRCAM））
This paper reviews the existing literature on input device evaluation and design in human-computer interaction (HCI) and discusses possible applications of this knowledge to the design and evaluation of new interfaces for musical expression. Specifically, a set of musical tasks is suggested to allow the evaluation of different existing controllers.
In this paper, we explore the tokenized representation of musical scores using the Transformer model to automatically generate musical scores. Thus far, sequence models have yielded fruitful results with note-level (MIDI-equivalent) symbolic representations of music. Although the note-level representations can comprise sufficient information to reproduce music aurally, they cannot contain adequate information to represent music visually in terms of notation. Musical scores contain various musical symbols (e.g., clef, key signature, and notes) and attributes (e.g., stem direction, beam, and tie…
Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná (UTFPR)（巴拉那联邦理工大学）
Musical genre's classification has been a relevant research topic. The association between music and genres is fundamental for the media industry, which manages musical recommendation systems, and for music streaming services, which may appear classified by genres. In this context, this work presents a feature extraction method for the automatic classification of musical genres, based on complex networks and their topological measurements. The proposed method initially converts the musics into sequences of musical notes and then maps the sequences as complex networks. Topological measurements …
Dalhousie University（达尔豪斯大学）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）；IICSI；Memorial University of Newfoundland（纽芬兰纪念大学）
In this paper, we propose a new compositional tool that will generate a musical outline of speech recorded/provided by the user for use as a musical building block in their compositions. The tool allows any user to use their own speech to generate musical material, while still being able to hear the direct connection between their recorded speech and the resulting music. The tool is built on our proposed pipeline. This pipeline begins with speech-based signal processing, after which some simple musical heuristics are applied, and finally these pre-processed signals are passed through Transform…
Università degli Studi di Padova（帕多瓦大学）；Vrije Universiteit Brussel（布鲁塞尔自由大学）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）
Computational models of music, while providing good descriptions of melodic development, still cannot fully grasp the general structure comprised of repetitions, transpositions, and reuse of melodic material. We present a corpus of strongly structured baroque allemandes, and describe a top-down approach to abstract the shared structure of their musical content using tree representations produced from pairwise differences between the Schenkerian-inspired analyses of each piece, thereby providing a rich hierarchical description of the corpus.
Institute of Systematic Musicology, University of Hamburg（汉堡大学系统音乐学研究所）；Hamburg University of Applied Sciences（汉堡应用科学大学）
When musicians perform in an ensemble, synchronizing to a mutual pace is the foundation of their musical interaction. Clock generators, e.g., metronomes, or drum machines, might assist such synchronization, but these means, in general, will also distort this natural, self-organized, inter-human synchronization process. In this work, the synchronization of musicians to an external rhythm is modeled using the Impulse Pattern Formulation (IPF), an analytical modeling approach for synergetic systems motivated by research on musical instruments. Nonlinear coupling of system components is described …
The behavior of users of music streaming services is investigated from the point of view of the temporal dimension of individual songs; specifically, the main object of the analysis is the point in time within a song at which users stop listening and start streaming another song ("skip"). The main contribution of this study is the ascertainment of a correlation between the distribution in time of skipping events and the musical structure of songs. It is also shown that such distribution is not only specific to the individual songs, but also independent of the cohort of users and, under station…
Nanjing University（南京大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
Automatic musical accompaniment is where a human musician is accompanied by a computer musician. The computer musician is able to produce musical accompaniment that relates musically to the human performance. The accompaniment should follow the performance using observations of the notes they are playing. This paper describes a complete and detailed construction of a score following and accompanying system using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). It details how to train a score HMM, how to deal with polyphonic input, how this HMM work when following score, how to build up a musical accompanist. It p…
