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Using Computers for Sophisticated Music Analysis
Posted by
Soulskill
on Mon Sep 22, 2008 03:40 PM
from the will-it-tell-you-how-bad-you-are-at-guitar-hero? dept.
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.'"
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Submission: computers listen to music by Anonymous Coward
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Results (Score:5, Funny)
Song: Hit Me Baby
Rating: Shit
Conclusion: Humans are weak and stupid
Action Plan: Terminate Britney Spears
Re: (Score:2)
Input from programmer :
>>action plan invalid --reason="cannot terminate artist"
>>new action plan
Action Plan 2: Self Terminate
See the good side of it (Score:2)
At least, this would require some melodic humming skill in order to be able to operate the Karaoke machine in the bar.
It will come as a form of protection against all those horrible "I can't sing so I just approximately squeal something completely out-of-tune in the microphone" experiences at the karaoke bar.
Re: (Score:2)
Fixed that for you
Re: (Score:2)
So why don't you take your self-inspired generalizations and go fuck yourself
Sounds like somebody's generalizations were a little too close for comfort...
The real idea... (Score:5, Funny)
You start humming and the RIAA deducts the money from your account for your reproduction.
Re: (Score:1, Offtopic)
Well, there is some humming involved when approached by the RIAA, but not the kind you think.
Re: (Score:2)
That depends on whether you've had plastic surgery since the last time you paid to hum that tune.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I don't think the RIAA has stooped quite as low yet as to interfere with your ability to reproduce
'Fake Plastic Trees' for the masses (Score:3, Funny)
MORE mellow than 'Fake Plastic Trees?'
This actually may work, especially if you are selling some sort of sleeping aid or anti-anxiety medication.
Neat stuff. (Score:4, 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.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
That reminded me of a funny Married with Children episode [youtube.com]. Oh, Al...
Better than cloning Simon Cowell (Score:2)
Well it was this or clone Simon Cowell so they can finally start that 24x7 American Idol channel....
Not new tech (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Not new tech (Score:5, Informative)
"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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not new tech (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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Also, the brain *is* a computer, just not one that's terribly similar to our current digital computers. It is a massively parallel pattern recognition system (or can be viewed as such). Theoretically, anything it can do could be simulated
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Re: (Score:2)
Music is, to a large extent, applied mathematics
In the same way that sex is applied biology? 'Cause that would really be missing the point of sex.
Re: (Score:2)
There is a lot more to music than 'simple math', if you think it's that simple and you have a math degree I urge you to pick up a violin and to try to put your ideas in to practice.
Music is all about expression, the composition is important, and has some mathematical connections but there is really a lot more to it than that.
Oversimplification is hardly ever apt, in music it is throwing out almost all that makes music rich and interesting.
Re: (Score:2)
So, Ray Kurzweil proved himself to be a lousy composer, so what ?
Recognising tunes from a simple rendition (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 [wikipedia.org] and is quite effective.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not a Luddite. But...
Is there some value to being able to recall a song, or at least to using your brain to perform the exercise of recalling from memory? This can effectively replace our need to perform this task. (New iPhone app: Hum into it and it will ID the song!) Extend that to all such tasks, which we generally regard as getting in the way of us doing what we really need to.
Example: Calculators very effectively replaced log tables, and we are all grateful for that. But they have also replaced val
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The iPhone app is already done, Midomi.
http://www.topiphoneresource.info/midomi-iphone-app-sing-hum-or-whistle-to-find-music/ [topiphoneresource.info]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 mess
Re: (Score:2)
In England there exists - or used to exist - a service that you could call with your cellphone, hold it up for a couple of seconds and it would text back a performer / title combo.
Re: (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 t
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Anyone in particular's Minuet in G (Bach? Mozart? Beethoven? Me?), or all of them? And I thought the key didn't matter, so that would be all minuets?
Re: (Score:2)
Dr. Gallaher?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Great Idea (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
auto-karaoke (Score:2)
That's the ticket, an auto-karaoke machine!
me: "We're no strangers to looooove..."
machine: [crackles, emits blue smoke]
Re: (Score:2)
that's ok, wait for the version where the industrial laser turret swings around to aim for you ;)
I was about to say... (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
the song features pop rock qualities, folk influences, a subtle use of vocal harmony, use of string ensemble, major key tonality, a vocal-centric aesthetic, a good dose of acoustic guitar pickin' (sic) a dynamic male vocalist, electric pianos, acoustic rhythm guitars, romantic lyrics...
While a sophisticated computer may be able to detect some of these characteristics, I stand by my comment.
Old. (Score:2)
Advanced music analyzing isn't new. There's software out there that can already successfully identify instruments, chords, progressions and even whole musical concepts, so classifying them by genre, intensiveness, instrument set and the like is just a querying problem.
Now, GENERATING music with math - that's where the fun begins. I've seen lots of approaches already, most of the successful ones based on fractals and powers-of-two, though I admit that they work only because of certain hardcoded "musical idea
unnecessary (Score:5, Funny)
You don't need software algorithms for that, just go download a Coldplay album. Except maybe replace "mellow" with "soulless."
Amarok Plugin (Score:1)
About this Karaoke++ (Score:1)
genre
Classical - lots of orchestral instruments
Hip-hop - repetitive loops of drum / bass with melodic lyrics
Rap - repititive loops of drum / bass with unmelodic lyrics
Techno - Synthetic (simple wavelength) instruments
etc.
mood
Major and minor chords.
composer or title
Huge music database + measuring contours, with "almost match" working. This doesn't sound incredibly sophisticated to me.
Re: (Score:2)
To help people search for music they might like ? (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.
Re: (Score:2)
It's pretty easy to get a mix with Pandora. Either seed a "station" with songs representing different styles, or create multiple stations and then listen to the "QuickMix".
Sofistokated (Score:2)
"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."
To paraphrase Douglas Adams: This is apparently a use of the word of 'sophisticated' of which I was unaware. And here I thought things like time/frequency analysis of notes and harmonics of chord sequences using continuous wavelet transform or analysis of dimensional comple
And this is news how ? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
actually afaik Pandora is an example of an "expert-driven" service. Songs were rated by experts on various categories and this metadata was used to organize them. Probably some automated analysis was also used to speed up the process.
This is different from LastFM which uses user-generated metadata, which is a concept that scales way better but may be less accurate.
Both of these can be mixed with automated techniques to enhance the results of course.
For more reading about ISMIR ... (Score:2)
From a researcher at Last.fm: http://mir-research.blogspot.com/2008/09/ismir-2008-demos.html [blogspot.com]
A researcher from strands: http://www.scwn.net/2008/09/ismir-past-present-and-future/ [scwn.net]
And lots of posts from my blog:
It needs more cowbel! !! (Score:2)
Definitely!
Re: (Score:2)
hum it, post it as an mp3 and ask the world what it is, maybe that would get you an answer ?