Music generation has always been a hot topic. When discussing symbolic music, melody or harmonies are usually seen as the only generating targets. But in fact, playing techniques are also quite an important part of the music. In this paper, we discuss the playing techniques generation problem by seeing it as a tagging problem. We propose a model that can use both the current data and external knowledge. Experiments were carried out by applying the proposed model in Chinese bamboo flute music, and results show that our method can make generated music more lively.
Recently, we proposed a self-attention based music tagging model. Different from most of the conventional deep architectures in music information retrieval, which use stacked 3x3 filters by treating music spectrograms as images, the proposed self-attention based model attempted to regard music as a temporal sequence of individual audio events. Not only the performance, but it could also facilitate better interpretability. In this paper, we mainly focus on visualizing and understanding the proposed self-attention based music tagging model.
Recent advances in deep learning accelerated the development of content-based automatic music tagging systems. Music information retrieval (MIR) researchers proposed various architecture designs, mainly based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), that achieve state-of-the-art results in this multi-label binary classification task. However, due to the differences in experimental setups followed by researchers, such as using different dataset splits and software versions for evaluation, it is difficult to compare the proposed architectures directly with each other. To facilitate further resea…
Self-attention is an attention mechanism that learns a representation by relating different positions in the sequence. The transformer, which is a sequence model solely based on self-attention, and its variants achieved state-of-the-art results in many natural language processing tasks. Since music composes its semantics based on the relations between components in sparse positions, adopting the self-attention mechanism to solve music information retrieval (MIR) problems can be beneficial. Hence, we propose a self-attention based deep sequence model for music tagging. The proposed architecture…
Automatic tagging of music is an important research topic in Music Information Retrieval and audio analysis algorithms proposed for this task have achieved improvements with advances in deep learning. In particular, many state-of-the-art systems use Convolutional Neural Networks and operate on mel-spectrogram representations of the audio. In this paper, we compare commonly used mel-spectrogram representations and evaluate model performances that can be achieved by reducing the input size in terms of both lesser amount of frequency bands and larger frame rates. We use the MagnaTagaTune dataset …
Peking University（北京大学）；Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, PKU（北京大学王选计算机研究所）；China Conservatory of Music（中国音乐学院）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Unlike melody extraction and other aspects of music transcription, research on playing technique detection is still in its early stages. Compared to existing work mostly focused on playing technique detection for individual single notes, we propose a general end-to-end method based on Sound Event Detection by FCN for musical instrument playing technique detection. In our case, we choose Erhu, a well-known Chinese bowed-stringed instrument, to experiment with our method. Because of the limitation of FCN, we present an algorithm to detect on variable length audio. The effectiveness of the propos…
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been successfully used in various Music Information Retrieval (MIR) tasks, both as end-to-end models and as feature extractors for more complex systems. However, the MIR field is still dominated by the classical VGG-based CNN architecture variants, often in combination with more complex modules such as attention, and/or techniques such as pre-training on large datasets. Deeper models such as ResNet -- which surpassed VGG by a large margin in other domains -- are rarely used in MIR. One of the main reasons for this, as we will show, is the lack of gener…
One of the main limitations in the field of audio signal processing is the lack of large public datasets with audio representations and high-quality annotations due to restrictions of copyrighted commercial music. We present Melon Playlist Dataset, a public dataset of mel-spectrograms for 649,091tracks and 148,826 associated playlists annotated by 30,652 different tags. All the data is gathered from Melon, a popular Korean streaming service. The dataset is suitable for music information retrieval tasks, in particular, auto-tagging and automatic playlist continuation. Even though the latter can…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术院）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Seoul National University（首尔大学）
Feature learning and deep learning have drawn great attention in recent years as a way of transforming input data into more effective representations using learning algorithms. Such interest has grown in the area of music information retrieval (MIR) as well, particularly in music audio classification tasks such as auto-tagging. In this paper, we present a two-stage learning model to effectively predict multiple labels from music audio. The first stage learns to project local spectral patterns of an audio track onto a high-dimensional sparse space in an unsupervised manner and summarizes the au…
We demonstrate that language models pre-trained on codified (discretely-encoded) music audio learn representations that are useful for downstream MIR tasks. Specifically, we explore representations from Jukebox (Dhariwal et al. 2020): a music generation system containing a language model trained on codified audio from 1M songs. To determine if Jukebox's representations contain useful information for MIR, we use them as input features to train shallow models on several MIR tasks. Relative to representations from conventional MIR models which are pre-trained on tagging, we find that using repres…
Graduate School of Culture Technology, KAIST（韩国科学技术院文化技术研究生院）；Adobe Research（奥多比研究院）
Deep representation learning offers a powerful paradigm for mapping input data onto an organized embedding space and is useful for many music information retrieval tasks. Two central methods for representation learning include deep metric learning and classification, both having the same goal of learning a representation that can generalize well across tasks. Along with generalization, the emerging concept of disentangled representations is also of great interest, where multiple semantic concepts (e.g., genre, mood, instrumentation) are learned jointly but remain separable in the learned repre…
Ss Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje（斯科普里圣西里尔与美多德大学）；Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies（电气工程与信息技术学院）
Music transcription is the process of transcribing music audio into music notation. It is a field in which the machines still cannot beat human performance. The main motivation for automatic music transcription is to make it possible for anyone playing a musical instrument, to be able to generate the music notes for a piece of music quickly and accurately. It does not matter if the person is a beginner and simply struggles to find the music score by searching, or an expert who heard a live jazz improvisation and would like to reproduce it without losing time doing manual transcription. We prop…
In this paper, we propose S3T, a self-supervised pre-training method with Swin Transformer for music classification, aiming to learn meaningful music representations from massive easily accessible unlabeled music data. S3T introduces a momentum-based paradigm, MoCo, with Swin Transformer as its feature extractor to music time-frequency domain. For better music representations learning, S3T contributes a music data augmentation pipeline and two specially designed pre-processors. To our knowledge, S3T is the first method combining the Swin Transformer with a self-supervised learning method for m…
We present Music Tagging Transformer that is trained with a semi-supervised approach. The proposed model captures local acoustic characteristics in shallow convolutional layers, then temporally summarizes the sequence of the extracted features using stacked self-attention layers. Through a careful model assessment, we first show that the proposed architecture outperforms the previous state-of-the-art music tagging models that are based on convolutional neural networks under a supervised scheme. The Music Tagging Transformer is further improved by noisy student training, a semi-supervised appro…
Multi-Source Contrastive Learning from Musical Audio
Institute of Language and Speech Proc., Athena Research Center（雅典娜研究中心语言与语音研究所）；Institute of Robotics, Athena Research Center（雅典娜研究中心机器人研究所）；School of ECE, National Technical University of Athens（雅典国家技术大学电气与计算机工程学院）
Ping An Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd（平安科技（深圳）有限公司）
In recent years, deep learning technique has received intense attention owing to its great success in image recognition. A tendency of adaption of deep learning in various information processing fields has formed, including music information retrieval (MIR). In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study on music audio classification with improved convolutional neural networks (CNNs). To the best of our knowledge, this the first work to apply Densely Connected Convolutional Networks (DenseNet) to music audio tagging, which has been demonstrated to perform better than Residual neural network (…
MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab（麻省理工学院-IBM沃森人工智能实验室）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
In this paper, we introduce Foley Music, a system that can synthesize plausible music for a silent video clip about people playing musical instruments. We first identify two key intermediate representations for a successful video to music generator: body keypoints from videos and MIDI events from audio recordings. We then formulate music generation from videos as a motion-to-MIDI translation problem. We present a Graph$-$Transformer framework that can accurately predict MIDI event sequences in accordance with the body movements. The MIDI event can then be converted to realistic music using an …
The focus of this work is to study how to efficiently tailor Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) towards learning timbre representations from log-mel magnitude spectrograms. We first review the trends when designing CNN architectures. Through this literature overview we discuss which are the crucial points to consider for efficiently learning timbre representations using CNNs. From this discussion we propose a design strategy meant to capture the relevant time-frequency contexts for learning timbre, which permits using domain knowledge for designing architectures. In addition, one of our main…
We propose a novel system that takes as an input body movements of a musician playing a musical instrument and generates music in an unsupervised setting. Learning to generate multi-instrumental music from videos without labeling the instruments is a challenging problem. To achieve the transformation, we built a pipeline named 'Multi-instrumentalistNet' (MI Net). At its base, the pipeline learns a discrete latent representation of various instruments music from log-spectrogram using a Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder (VQ-VAE) with multi-band residual blocks. The pipeline is then traine…
Pronounced as "musician", the musicnn library contains a set of pre-trained musically motivated convolutional neural networks for music audio tagging: https://github.com/jordipons/musicnn. This repository also includes some pre-trained vgg-like baselines. These models can be used as out-of-the-box music audio taggers, as music feature extractors, or as pre-trained models for transfer learning. We also provide the code to train the aforementioned models: https://github.com/jordipons/musicnn-training. This framework also allows implementing novel models. For example, a musically motivated convol…
VioPTT: Violin Technique-Aware Transcription from Synthetic Data Augmentation
Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc.（索尼计算机科学实验室有限公司）；Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica（学术院信息研究所）；Graduate Institute of Communication Engineering, National Taiwan University（国立台湾大学通信工程研究所）；Original Content Center, Gamania Inc.（Gamania公司原创内容中心）
Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
While end-to-end systems are becoming popular in auditory signal processing including automatic music tagging, models using raw audio as input needs a large amount of data and computational resources without domain knowledge. Inspired by the fact that temporal modulation is regarded as an essential component in auditory perception, we introduce the Temporal Modulation Neural Network (TMNN) that combines Mel-like data-driven front ends and temporal modulation filters with a simple ResNet back end. The structure includes a set of temporal modulation filters to capture long-term patterns in all f…
Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；Universal Music Group（环球音乐集团）
Content-based music information retrieval has seen rapid progress with the adoption of deep learning. Current approaches to high-level music description typically make use of classification models, such as in auto-tagging or genre and mood classification. In this work, we propose to address music description via audio captioning, defined as the task of generating a natural language description of music audio content in a human-like manner. To this end, we present the first music audio captioning model, MusCaps, consisting of an encoder-decoder with temporal attention. Our method combines convo…
Transformers have drawn attention in the MIR field for their remarkable performance shown in natural language processing and computer vision. However, prior works in the audio processing domain mostly use Transformer as a temporal feature aggregator that acts similar to RNNs. In this paper, we propose SpecTNT, a Transformer-based architecture to model both spectral and temporal sequences of an input time-frequency representation. Specifically, we introduce a novel variant of the Transformer-in-Transformer (TNT) architecture. In each SpecTNT block, a spectral Transformer extracts frequency-rela…
Institute of Computational Perception, Johannes Kepler University（约翰内斯·开普勒大学计算感知研究所）；Interactive Audio Lab, Northwestern University（西北大学交互音频实验室）；LIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, Johannes Kepler University（约翰内斯·开普勒大学LIT人工智能实验室）
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successfully applied in a wide variety of music information retrieval (MIR) tasks but their predictions are usually not interpretable. We propose audioLIME, a method based on Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME) extended by a musical definition of locality. The perturbations used in LIME are created by switching on/off components extracted by source separation which makes our explanations listenable. We validate audioLIME on two different music tagging systems and show that it produces sensible explanations in situations where a competing metho…
Along with the evolution of music technology, a large number of styles, or "subgenres," of Electronic Dance Music(EDM) have emerged in recent years. While the classification task of distinguishing between EDM and non-EDM has been often studied in the context of music genre classification, little work has been done on the more challenging EDM subgenre classification. The state-of-art model is based on extremely randomized trees and could be improved by deep learning methods. In this paper, we extend the state-of-art music auto-tagging model "short-chunkCNN+Resnet" to EDM subgenre classification…
Convolutional neural networks (CNN) recently gained notable attraction in a variety of machine learning tasks: including music classification and style tagging. In this work, we propose implementing intermediate connections to the CNN architecture to facilitate the transfer of multi-scale/level knowledge between different layers. Our novel model for music tagging shows significant improvement in comparison to the proposed approaches in the literature, due to its ability to carry low-level timbral features to the last layer.
From West to East: Who can understand the music of the others better?
National Technical University of Athens（雅典国立技术大学）；School of ECE, National Technical University of Athens（雅典国立技术大学电子与计算机工程学院）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦大学玛丽皇后学院）；Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London（伦敦大学玛丽皇后学院数字音乐中心）
Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；Centre for Digital Music（数字音乐中心）
Convolutional Neural Networks have been extensively explored in the task of automatic music tagging. The problem can be approached by using either engineered time-frequency features or raw audio as input. Modulation filter bank representations that have been actively researched as a basis for timbre perception have the potential to facilitate the extraction of perceptually salient features. We explore end-to-end learned front-ends for audio representation learning, ModNet and SincModNet, that incorporate a temporal modulation processing block. The structure is effectively analogous to a modula…
Universitat Pompeu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学）；Pandora Media Inc.（潘多拉媒体公司）
The lack of data tends to limit the outcomes of deep learning research, particularly when dealing with end-to-end learning stacks processing raw data such as waveforms. In this study, 1.2M tracks annotated with musical labels are available to train our end-to-end models. This large amount of data allows us to unrestrictedly explore two different design paradigms for music auto-tagging: assumption-free models - using waveforms as input with very small convolutional filters; and models that rely on domain knowledge - log-mel spectrograms with a convolutional neural network designed to learn timb…
Large music content libraries often comprise multiple versions of a piece of music. To establish a link between different versions, automatic music alignment methods map each position in one version to a corresponding position in another version. Due to the leeway in interpreting a piece, any two versions can differ significantly, for example, in terms of local tempo, articulation, or playing style. For a given pair of versions, these differences can be significant such that even state-of-the-art methods fail to identify a correct alignment. In this paper, we present a novel method that increa…
Graduate School of Culture Technology, KAIST（韩国科学技术院文化技术研究生院）；NAVER Corp.（NAVER公司）
Audio-based music classification and tagging is typically based on categorical supervised learning with a fixed set of labels. This intrinsically cannot handle unseen labels such as newly added music genres or semantic words that users arbitrarily choose for music retrieval. Zero-shot learning can address this problem by leveraging an additional semantic space of labels where side information about the labels is used to unveil the relationship between each other. In this work, we investigate the zero-shot learning in the music domain and organize two different setups of side information. One i…
BeatEdit: Symbolic Music Generation as Explicit Editing
School of Future Technology South China University of Technology Guangzhou China（未来技术学院 华南理工大学 广州 中国）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Nanjing University（南京大学）
Existing music recognition applications require a connection to a server that performs the actual recognition. In this paper we present a low-power music recognizer that runs entirely on a mobile device and automatically recognizes music without user interaction. To reduce battery consumption, a small music detector runs continuously on the mobile device's DSP chip and wakes up the main application processor only when it is confident that music is present. Once woken, the recognizer on the application processor is provided with a few seconds of audio which is fingerprinted and compared to the …
Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；New York University（纽约大学）
Deep neural networks (DNN) have been successfully applied to music classification including music tagging. However, there are several open questions regarding the training, evaluation, and analysis of DNNs. In this article, we investigate specific aspects of neural networks, the effects of noisy labels, to deepen our understanding of their properties. We analyse and (re-)validate a large music tagging dataset to investigate the reliability of training and evaluation. Using a trained network, we compute label vector similarities which is compared to groundtruth similarity. The results highlight…
New York University（纽约大学）；Flatiron Institute（弗莱提伦研究所）；École Centrale de Nantes（南特中央理工学院）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）
The expressive variability in producing a musical note conveys information essential to the modeling of orchestration and style. As such, it plays a crucial role in computer-assisted browsing of massive digital music corpora. Yet, although the automatic recognition of a musical instrument from the recording of a single "ordinary" note is considered a solved problem, automatic identification of instrumental playing technique (IPT) remains largely underdeveloped. We benchmark machine listening systems for query-by-example browsing among 143 extended IPTs for 16 instruments, amounting to 469 trip…
We present Mirable's submission to the 2021 Emotions and Themes in Music challenge. In this work, we intend to address the question: can we leverage semi-supervised learning techniques on music emotion recognition? With that, we experiment with noisy student training, which has improved model performance in the image classification domain. As the noisy student method requires a strong teacher model, we further delve into the factors including (i) input training length and (ii) complementary music representations to further boost the performance of the teacher model. For (i), we find that model…
