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Using Computers for Sophisticated Music Analysis
Tom Avril writes "Need an accompaniment for your melody? Seeking a virtual dancer to try out your new choreography? Or perhaps you're making a new TV commercial, and you need a snippet of music that sounds something like Radiohead, but a bit more mellow. Increasingly, sophisticated software can help with these sorts of tasks. We got a look at the latest from the nascent field of Music Information Retrieval, after its conference in Philadelphia: 'A key part of the conference each year is the announcement of results from a sort of software shoot-out — a competition in which various universities pit their music-analysis algorithms against one another. Entrants from more than a dozen countries competed in 18 tasks, using their computers to "listen" to selections of music, then identify such things as the genre, mood, composer or title. The eventual goal: to help people search for music they might like by combing through millions of audio files in a database. ... In another task, the computer had to identify tunes that someone hummed. "The idea is, you go into the karaoke bar and start humming, and the computer retrieves your song," Downie said.'"
The problem with this technology, and what Pandora or LastFm applied, is that the programs tend to choose always the same kind of music, and it's boring.
When I listen to music, I like to have some variety, not always playing the same thing, again and again, in different forms.
I like listening to one genre, and then switch to another genre, and the programs are unable to provide that.
The Music Genome Project is definitely tracking things that (at this point) take a human to notice. Features like "great trumpet solo" or "ambiguous lyrics" are quite a bit beyond the sorts of musical features being extracted by the tools described in the papers at the conference, based on the few I looked at.
Humans are fantastic musical processors. Computers not so much. Which is what makes the problem so fascinating, I think.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
music is not math, man. sorry.
"Music is a communicative signal
comprised of patterns whose
performance and perception are
governed by combinatorial rules, or
a sort of musical grammar" -John Sloboda
that being said, music is not language either, and the brain is not a computer.
if you don't like algorithmic music, or atonal music, don't listen to it. and certainly don't rely on a computer to tell you what art you should absorb and experience...
and, i have to say, i appreciate the reverence for human composers, but mathematics has no bearing on my music apart from the incidental involvement of things like acoustics. to say otherwise is to turn the human composer into a mere algorithm machine.
guess we're just gonna have to agree to disagree, man.
you are speaking in analogies to try to define something that is, in itself, abstract. i actually prefer to tell my students that music is "sound organized in time", it's a much better definition.
by the same token i could tell you that language is a specific form of music, since they share certain features, but language communicates specific semantic concepts whereas music does not (in the absence of lyrics).
the difference between art and science is the difference between imagination and reason. if you want to listen to music and think about numbers, go ahead -- but not all music is like that, nor is it intended to be.
"Reason is the enumeration of quantities already known; Imagination is the perception of the value of those quantities, both seperately and as a whole. Reason respects the differences, and Imagination the similitudes of things. Reason is to Imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance." -Percy Shelley
Math is the language of reason, music is (one) language of imagination. They are compatible, sure. But I'd like to see a computer able to see beyond quantities and tell me the nature of the imagination behind a piece of music...
We may be creating technology which will gradually make us a non-contemplative people, living only in the moment. And if you live in the moment, you forget the past, allowing those in control to make you repeat it.
Your quote shows that we are not... as I assume you are pretty well immersed in technology since your posting on slashdot.
I would argue that technology has actually made us a more contemplative people.
Visit a farm someday, someplace rural and 'backward', and you will find that as a whole the people there are much simpler and much less likely to question the nature of our existence.
On the flip side, some of the most profound things I have heard said in recent times have come from the mouths of some text messaging, youtubing, myspace obsessed teens. Apparently there is something gained by having all of this technology at our disposal, and much of it is in the area of deeper thought.
It is true that something is lost when we allow computers to simplify some of the old, character building, exercises in patience that were done in the past... but I believe that the losses are more than made up by a greater amount of creativity, ability, and openness.
The one thing that no amount of technology can replace is the human mind's ability question the world around us... technology has only allowed us to move past much of the mundane stuff in pursuit of higher goals.
I hope that someday mathematics would be a conceptual course like most science courses. With computers and calculators able to do the math, lets let non-mathematicians focus on understanding what math does, where it's used, and how to apply it and then give them a calculator to actually do the math. Perhaps an association of Mathmaticians could be formed that would design, test, and certify software or calculating devices as being accurate... so that an aspiring engineer could focus instead on learning the principals of engineering.
I made it through an engineering degree with a great calculator and a piss poor command of Trig and Calculus. I wish the 8 math classes I had to take had been less about solving equations and more about forming equations. As a working adult I find that what I really need to know is how to look at what I do know and use it to find what I don't. Sure I can solve the equation, but little good it does me if I don't know the equation in the first place. Had I spent more time on math application theory and less on memorizing rules and tricks to solve the problem I would be far better off now because I could let the computer solve the problem for me once I formed it.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.