A Systematic Comparison of Music Similarity Adaptation Approaches

In order to support individual user perspectives and different retrieval tasks, music similarity can no longer be considered as a static element of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) systems. Various approaches have been proposed recently that allow dynamic adaptation of music similarity measures. This paper provides a systematic comparison of algorithms for metric learning and higher-level facet distance weighting on the MagnaTagATune dataset. A crossvalidation variant taking into account clip availability is presented. Applied on user generated similarity data, its effect on adaptation performance is analyzed. Special attention is paid to the amount of training data necessary for making similarity predictions on unknown data, the number of model parameters and the amount of information available about the music itself. 1

Social Collaborative Retrieval

Socially-based recommendation systems have recently attracted significant interest, and a number of studies have shown that social information can dramatically improve a system's predictions of user interests. Meanwhile, there are now many potential applications that involve aspects of both recommendation and information retrieval, and the task of collaborative retrieval---a combination of these two traditional problems---has recently been introduced. Successful collaborative retrieval requires overcoming severe data sparsity, making additional sources of information, such as social graphs, particularly valuable. In this paper we propose a new model for collaborative retrieval, and show that our algorithm outperforms current state-of-the-art approaches by incorporating information from social networks. We also provide empirical analyses of the ways in which cultural interests propagate along a social graph using a real-world music dataset.Comment: 10 page

Modeling Temporal Structure in Music for Emotion Prediction using Pairwise Comparisons

The temporal structure of music is essential for the cognitive processes related to the emotions expressed in music. However, such temporal information is often disregarded in typical Music Information Retrieval modeling tasks of predicting higher-level cognitive or semantic aspects of music such as emotions, genre, and similarity. This paper addresses the specific hypothesis whether temporal information is essential for predicting expressed emotions in music, as a prototypical example of a cognitive aspect of music. We propose to test this hypothesis using a novel processing pipeline: 1) Extracting audio features for each track resulting in a multivariate "feature time series". 2) Using generative models to represent these time series (acquiring a complete track representation). Specifically, we explore the Gaussian Mixture model, Vector Quantization, Autoregressive model, Markov and Hidden Markov models. 3) Utilizing the generative models in a discriminative setting by selecting the Probability Product Kernel as the natural kernel for all considered track representations. We evaluate the representations using a kernel based model specifically extended to support the robust two-alternative forced choice self-report paradigm, used for eliciting expressed emotions in music. The methods are evaluated using two data sets and show increased predictive performance using temporal information, thus supporting the overall hypothesis

Can MusicGen Create Training Data for MIR Tasks?

We are investigating the broader concept of using AI-based generative music systems to generate training data for Music Information Retrieval (MIR) tasks. To kick off this line of work, we ran an initial experiment in which we trained a genre classifier on a fully artificial music dataset created with MusicGen. We constructed over 50 000 genre- conditioned textual descriptions and generated a collection of music excerpts that covers five musical genres. Our preliminary results show that the proposed model can learn genre-specific characteristics from artificial music tracks that generalise well to real-world music recordings.Comment: This is an extended abstract presented at the Late-Breaking / Demo Session of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR) 2023 (Milan, Italy

Feature extraction for speech and music discrimination

Driven by the demand of information retrieval, video editing and human-computer interface, in this paper we propose a novel spectral feature for music and speech discrimination. This scheme attempts to simulate a biological model using the averaged cepstrum, where human perception tends to pick up the areas of large cepstral changes. The cepstrum data that is away from the mean value will be exponentially reduced in magnitude. We conduct experiments of music/speech discrimination by comparing the performance of the proposed feature with that of previously proposed features in classification. The dynamic time warping based classification verifies that the proposed feature has the best quality of music/speech classification in the test database

MusCaps: generating captions for music audio

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 convolutional and recurrent neural network architectures to jointly process audio-text inputs through a multimodal encoder and leverages pre-training on audio data to obtain representations that effectively capture and summarise musical features in the input. Evaluation of the generated captions through automatic metrics shows that our method outperforms a baseline designed for non-music audio captioning. Through an ablation study, we unveil that this performance boost can be mainly attributed to pre-training of the audio encoder, while other design choices – modality fusion, decoding strategy and the use of attention -- contribute only marginally. Our model represents a shift away from classification-based music description and combines tasks requiring both auditory and linguistic understanding to bridge the semantic gap in music information retrieval

Modeling Temporal Structure in Music for Emotion Prediction using Pairwise Comparisons

The temporal structure of music is essential for the cognitive processes related to the emotions expressed in music. However, such temporal information is often disregarded in typical Music Information Retrieval modeling tasks of predicting higher-level cognitive or semantic aspects of music such as emotions, genre, and similarity. This paper addresses the specific hypothesis whether temporal information is essential for predicting expressed emotions in music, as a prototypical example of a cognitive aspect of music. We propose to test this hypothesis using a novel processing pipeline: 1) Extracting audio features for each track resulting in a multivariate "feature time series". 2) Using generative models to represent these time series (acquiring a complete track representation). Specifically, we explore the Gaussian Mixture model, Vector Quantization, Autoregressive model, Markov and Hidden Markov models. 3) Utilizing the generative models in a discriminative setting by selecting the Probability Product Kernel as the natural kernel for all considered track representations. We evaluate the representations using a kernel based model specifically extended to support the robust two-alternative forced choice self-report paradigm, used for eliciting expressed emotions in music. The methods are evaluated using two data sets and show increased predictive performance using temporal information, thus supporting the overall hypothesis