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Using Computers for Sophisticated Music Analysis

Posted by Soulskill on from the will-it-tell-you-how-bad-you-are-at-guitar-hero? dept.

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.'"

12 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. Results by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Artist: Britney Spears
    Song: Hit Me Baby
    Rating: Shit
    Conclusion: Humans are weak and stupid

    Action Plan: Terminate Britney Spears

  2. The real idea... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    You start humming and the RIAA deducts the money from your account for your reproduction.

  3. Neat stuff. by pushing-robot · · Score: 3, Funny

    On the one hand, I'd love it if my home stereo could determine what song I was humming and start playing along.

    On the other hand, my family would kill me.

    --
    How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
  4. Not new tech by Ethanol-fueled · · Score: 3, Informative

    While this technology is very neat, programs which convert sound(wav/mp3) into Midi data have existed for many years. The programs featured in the competition are the next logical step. It's simply data-mining applied to music.

    Music is math, but math is not necessarily music. Much of the computerized music based on mathematics alone sounds like atonal shit. Mathematical algorithms can be great for accompaniment but are not meant to replace a human composer.

    1. Re:Not new tech by ahankinson · · Score: 5, Informative

      If you think this technology is like a midi->wav converter only better, you're off by orders of magnitude.

      "Simply" data mining for music is a significant problem. What data do you mine? The audio signal does not contain all of the perceptual cues we understand as humans, and so things like "rhythm" and "tempo"; i.e. the things in music that get us to dance or tap our feet to it, are hard to pinpoint and even harder to extract.

      Other problems, such as the Query-by-humming problem, are further complicated by two intractable problems: 1. People can't sing well out of their head, and 2. What they do sing may or may not bear any resemblance to the actual song they're remembering.

      This research uses the latest advances in signal processing, machine learning, psychoacoustics, computer vision and pattern recognition. To compare it to a midi to wave converter is like comparing a paper airplane to the space shuttle.

    2. Re:Not new tech by cybin · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  5. Recognising tunes from a simple rendition by HuguesT · · Score: 5, Informative

    The tune recognition task is easier than it sounds (ha). In fact it's enough to hum the *contour* of the music, i.e. whether it simply goes up or down, for a couple of bars, ignoring the rythm even.

    This way of indexing and recognising music is called the Parson Code and is quite effective.

    1. Re:Recognising tunes from a simple rendition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      One of my senior projects for college used a very similar but more detailed schema in recognizing musical patterns.

      In musical terms, a step is the amount of change from note-to-note. The Parson Code is limited in which it only indicates the direction of the pitch, and not the amount. I simply took account the actual half-steps used between each pitch. Like the Parson Code, it would ignore the rhythm, and easily account for identical melodies that are in different keys.

      Minuet in G would look something like this:
      -7 2 2 1 2 -7 0 9 -4 2 2 2 1 -12 0 5 2 -2 -1 -2 2 1 -1 -2 -2 -1 1 2 2 -4 4 -2

      It was fairly easy for me to find an exact match using that encoding, or match to a certain %, since more information is provided than using the Parson Code method.

      I feel that this is not far off from how the human brain recognizes melodies as most people do not have perfect pitch, but relative pitch in which we can recognize a certain melody by the difference in pitch changes even when the melody is using a different rhythm, or is in a different key than the original.

    2. Re:Recognising tunes from a simple rendition by cleatsupkeep · · Score: 3, Informative

      The iPhone app is already done, Midomi.

      http://www.topiphoneresource.info/midomi-iphone-app-sing-hum-or-whistle-to-find-music/

  6. Great Idea by pete-classic · · Score: 5, Funny

    Self-regulating karaoke. If the computer can't tell what the hell you're singing it's probably best for you to stay off the stage.

    -Peter

  7. unnecessary by JustSee12 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    You don't need software algorithms for that, just go download a Coldplay album. Except maybe replace "mellow" with "soulless."

  8. To help people search for music they might like ? by eulernet · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.