The assessment of music performances in most cases takes into account the underlying musical score being performed. While there have been several automatic approaches for objective music performance assessment (MPA) based on extracted features from both the performance audio and the score, deep neural network-based methods incorporating score information into MPA models have not yet been investigated. In this paper, we introduce three different models capable of score-informed performance assessment. These are (i) a convolutional neural network that utilizes a simple time-series input comprising of aligned pitch contours and score, (ii) a joint embedding model which learns a joint latent space for pitch contours and scores, and (iii) a distance matrix-based convolutional neural network which utilizes patterns in the distance matrix between pitch contours and musical score to predict assessment ratings. Our results provide insights into the suitability of different architectures and input representations and demonstrate the benefits of score-informed models as compared to score-independent models.
The integration of additional side information to improve music source separation has been investigated numerous times, e.g., by adding features to the input or by adding learning targets in a multi-task learning scenario. These approaches, however, require additional annotations such as musical scores, instrument labels, etc. in training and possibly during inference. The available datasets for source separation do not usually provide these additional annotations. In this work, we explore transfer learning strategies to incorporate VGGish features with a state-of-the-art source separation mod…
This Thesis discusses the development of technologies for the automatic resynthesis of music recordings using digital synthesizers. First, the main issue is identified in the understanding of how Music Information Processing (MIP) methods can take into consideration the influence of the acoustic context on the music performance. For this, a novel conceptual and mathematical framework named "Music Interpretation Analysis" (MIA) is presented. In the proposed framework, a distinction is made between the "performance" - the physical action of playing - and the "interpretation" - the action that th…
Several automatic approaches for objective music performance assessment (MPA) have been proposed in the past, however, existing systems are not yet capable of reliably predicting ratings with the same accuracy as professional judges. This study investigates contrastive learning as a potential method to improve existing MPA systems. Contrastive learning is a widely used technique in representation learning to learn a structured latent space capable of separately clustering multiple classes. It has been shown to produce state of the art results for image-based classification problems. We introdu…
Computational aesthetics evaluation has made great achievements in the field of visual arts, but the research work on music still needs to be explored. Although the existing work of music generation is very substantial, the quality of music score generated by AI is relatively poor compared with that created by human composers. The music scores created by AI are usually monotonous and devoid of emotion. Based on Birkhoff's aesthetic measure, this paper proposes an objective quantitative evaluation method for homophony music score aesthetic quality assessment. The main contributions of our work …
Research Center for Information Technology Innovation, Academia Sinica（中央研究院信息技术创新研究中心）
Singing voice separation attempts to separate the vocal and instrumental parts of a music recording, which is a fundamental problem in music information retrieval. Recent work on singing voice separation has shown that the low-rank representation and informed separation approaches are both able to improve separation quality. However, low-rank optimizations are computationally inefficient due to the use of singular value decompositions. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new linear-time algorithm called informed group-sparse representation, and use it to separate the vocals from music using…
Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）；Grenoble-INP - Institut Polytechnique de Grenoble（格勒诺布尔理工学院）；Télécom Paris - Institut Polytechnique de Paris（巴黎电信学院 - 巴黎理工学院）；Spotify；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；I3S（I3S实验室）；ISIR（智能系统与机器人研究所）；Universitat Pompeu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学）；MTG（音乐技术组）；Centre Inria Nancy - Grand Est（法国国家信息与自动化研究院南锡-大东部研究中心）
This dissertation proposes the study of multimodal learning in the context of musical signals. Throughout, we focus on the interaction between audio signals and text information. Among the many text sources related to music that can be used (e.g. reviews, metadata, or social network feedback), we concentrate on lyrics. The singing voice directly connects the audio signal and the text information in a unique way, combining melody and lyrics where a linguistic dimension complements the abstraction of musical instruments. Our study focuses on the audio and lyrics interaction for targeting source …
Peking Opera has been the most dominant form of Chinese performing art since around 200 years ago. A Peking Opera singer usually exhibits a very strong personal style via introducing improvisation and expressiveness on stage which leads the actual rhythm and pitch contour to deviate significantly from the original music score. This inconsistency poses a great challenge in Peking Opera singing voice synthesis from a music score. In this work, we propose to deal with this issue and synthesize expressive Peking Opera singing from the music score based on the Duration Informed Attention Network (D…
An Order-Complexity Model for Aesthetic Quality Assessment of Homophony Music Performance
Beijing Electronic Science and Technology Institute（北京电子科技学院）；Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence (BIGAI)（北京通用人工智能研究院）；Tongji University（同济大学）；Tianjin Conservatory of Music（天津音乐学院）
Several methods have been developed to assess the perceptual quality of audio under transforms like lossy compression. However, they require paired reference signals of the unaltered content, limiting their use in applications where references are unavailable. This has hindered progress in audio generation and style transfer, where a no-reference quality assessment method would allow more reproducible comparisons across methods. We propose training a GAN on a large music library, and using its discriminator as a no-reference quality assessment measure of the perceived quality of music. This me…
With the recent advancements of data driven approaches using deep neural networks, music source separation has been formulated as an instrument-specific supervised problem. While existing deep learning models implicitly absorb the spatial information conveyed by the multi-channel input signals, we argue that a more explicit and active use of spatial information could not only improve the separation process but also provide an entry-point for many user-interaction based tools. To this end, we introduce a control method based on the stereophonic location of the sources of interest, expressed as …
Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；NYU Shanghai（上海纽约大学）；MBZUAI（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
Lyric interpretations can help people understand songs and their lyrics quickly, and can also make it easier to manage, retrieve and discover songs efficiently from the growing mass of music archives. In this paper we propose BART-fusion, a novel model for generating lyric interpretations from lyrics and music audio that combines a large-scale pre-trained language model with an audio encoder. We employ a cross-modal attention module to incorporate the audio representation into the lyrics representation to help the pre-trained language model understand the song from an audio perspective, while …
Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；Doremir Music Research AB（Doremir音乐研究公司）
This paper proposes a deep convolutional neural network for performing note-level instrument assignment. Given a polyphonic multi-instrumental music signal along with its ground truth or predicted notes, the objective is to assign an instrumental source for each note. This problem is addressed as a pitch-informed classification task where each note is analysed individually. We also propose to utilise several kernel shapes in the convolutional layers in order to facilitate learning of efficient timbre-discriminative feature maps. Experiments on the MusicNet dataset using 7 instrument classes sh…
Peransformer: Improving Low-informed Expressive Performance Rendering with Score-aware Discriminator
School of Computing, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学计算机学院）；Integrative Sciences and Engineering Programme, NUS Graduate School（新加坡国立大学整合科学与工程项目）
HAAQI-Net: A Non-intrusive Neural Music Audio Quality Assessment Model for Hearing Aids
Academia Sinica（中央研究院）；National Chengchi University（国立政治大学）；National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University（国立阳明交通大学）；Research Center for Information Technology Innovation, Academia Sinica（中央研究院资讯科技创新研究中心）；Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica（中央研究院资讯科学研究所）；College of Informatics, National Chengchi University（国立政治大学资讯学院）；Institute of Communications Engineering, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University（国立阳明交通大学通讯工程研究所）
Most music source separation systems require large collections of isolated sources for training, which can be difficult to obtain. In this work, we use musical scores, which are comparatively easy to obtain, as a weak label for training a source separation system. In contrast with previous score-informed separation approaches, our system does not require isolated sources, and score is used only as a training target, not required for inference. Our model consists of a separator that outputs a time-frequency mask for each instrument, and a transcriptor that acts as a critic, providing both tempo…
In this paper, we introduce a simple method that can separate arbitrary musical instruments from an audio mixture. Given an unaligned MIDI transcription for a target instrument from an input mixture, we synthesize new mixtures from the midi transcription that sound similar to the mixture to be separated. This lets us create a labeled training set to train a network on the specific bespoke task. When this model applied to the original mixture, we demonstrate that this method can: 1) successfully separate out the desired instrument with access to only unaligned MIDI, 2) separate arbitrary instru…
A musical performance renders an acoustic realization of a musical score or other representation of a composition. Different performances of the same composition may vary in terms of performance parameters such as timing or dynamics, and these variations may have a major impact on how a listener perceives the music. The analysis of music performance has traditionally been a peripheral topic for the MIR research community, where often a single audio recording is used as representative of a musical work. This paper surveys the field of Music Performance Analysis (MPA) from several perspectives i…
Music is often experienced as a progression of concurrent streams of notes, or voices. The degree to which this happens depends on the position along a voice-leading continuum, ranging from monophonic, to homophonic, to polyphonic, which complicates the design of automatic voice separation models. We address this continuum by defining voice separation as the task of decomposing music into streams that exhibit both a high degree of external perceptual separation from the other streams and a high degree of internal perceptual consistency. The proposed voice separation task allows for a voice to …
Universidad de Jaén（哈恩大学）；Tampere University（坦佩雷大学）
This work addresses the problem of multichannel source separation combining two powerful approaches, multichannel spectral factorization with recent monophonic deep-learning (DL) based spectrum inference. Individual source spectra at different channels are estimated with a Masker-Denoiser Twin Network (MaD TwinNet), able to model long-term temporal patterns of a musical piece. The monophonic source spectrograms are used within a spatial covariance mixing model based on Complex Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (CNMF) that predicts the spatial characteristics of each source. The proposed framew…
Plate and spring reverberators are electromechanical systems first used and researched as means to substitute real room reverberation. Nowadays they are often used in music production for aesthetic reasons due to their particular sonic characteristics. The modeling of these audio processors and their perceptual qualities is difficult since they use mechanical elements together with analog electronics resulting in an extremely complex response. Based on digital reverberators that use sparse FIR filters, we propose a signal processing-informed deep learning architecture for the modeling of artif…
This paper studies the prediction of chord progressions for jazz music by relying on machine learning models. The motivation of our study comes from the recent success of neural networks for performing automatic music composition. Although high accuracies are obtained in single-step prediction scenarios, most models fail to generate accurate multi-step chord predictions. In this paper, we postulate that this comes from the multi-scale structure of musical information and propose new architectures based on an iterative temporal aggregation of input labels. Specifically, the input and ground tru…
Mode-conditioned music learning and composition: a spiking neural network inspired by neuroscience and psychology
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Key Laboratory of Brain Cognition and Brain-inspired Intelligence Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院脑认知与类脑智能技术重点实验室）
