Using the beat histogram for speech rhythm description and language identification

In this paper we present a novel approach for the description of speech rhythm and the extraction of rhythm-related features for automatic language identification (LID). Previous methods have extracted speech rhythm through the calculation of features based on salient elements of speech such as consonants, vowels and syllables. We present how an automatic rhythm extraction method borrowed from music information retrieval, the beat histogram, can be adapted for the analysis of speech rhythm by defining the most relevant novelty functions in the speech signal and extracting features describing their periodicities. We have evaluated those features in a rhythm-based LID task for two multilingual speech corpora using support vector machines, including feature selection methods to identify the most informative descriptors. Results suggest that the method is successful in describing speech rhythm and provides LID classification accuracy comparable to or better than that of other approaches, without the need for a preceding segmentation or annotation of the speech signal. Concerning rhythm typology, the rhythm class hypothesis in its original form seems to be only partly confirmed by our results

The Skipping Behavior of Users of Music Streaming Services and its Relation to Musical Structure

The behavior of users of music streaming services is investigated from the point of view of the temporal dimension of individual songs; specifically, the main object of the analysis is the point in time within a song at which users stop listening and start streaming another song ("skip"). The main contribution of this study is the ascertainment of a correlation between the distribution in time of skipping events and the musical structure of songs. It is also shown that such distribution is not only specific to the individual songs, but also independent of the cohort of users and, under stationary conditions, date of observation. Finally, user behavioral data is used to train a predictor of the musical structure of a song solely from its acoustic content; it is shown that the use of such data, available in large quantities to music streaming services, yields significant improvements in accuracy over the customary fashion of training this class of algorithms, in which only smaller amounts of hand-labeled data are available

Speaker Identification for Swiss German with Spectral and Rhythm Features

We present results of speech rhythm analysis for automatic speaker identification. We expand previous experiments using similar methods for language identification. Features describing the rhythmic properties of salient changes in signal components are extracted and used in an speaker identification task to determine to which extent they are descriptive of speaker variability. We also test the performance of state-of-the-art but simple-to-extract frame-based features. The paper focus is the evaluation on one corpus (swiss german, TEVOID) using support vector machines. Results suggest that the general spectral features can provide very good performance on this dataset, whereas the rhythm features are not as successful in the task, indicating either the lack of suitability for this task or the dataset specificity

Beat histogram features for rhythm-based musical genre classification using multiple novelty functions

In this paper we present beat histogram features for multiple level rhythm description and evaluate them in a musical genre classification task. Audio features pertaining to various musical content categories and their related novelty functions are extracted as a basis for the creation of beat histograms. The proposed features capture not only amplitude, but also tonal and general spectral changes in the signal, aiming to represent as much rhythmic information as possible. The most and least informative features are identified through feature selection methods and are then tested using Support Vector Machines on five genre datasets concerning classification accuracy against a baseline feature set. Results show that the presented features provide comparable classification accuracy with respect to other genre classification approaches using periodicity histograms and display a performance close to that of much more elaborate up-to-date approaches for rhythm description. The use of bar boundary annotations for the texture frames has provided an improvement for the dance-oriented Ballroom dataset. The comparably small number of descriptors and the possibility of evaluating the influence of specific signal components to the general rhythmic content encourage the further use of the method in rhythm description tasks

Audio-visual foreground extraction for event characterization

This paper presents a new method able to integrate audio and visual information for scene analysis in a typical surveillance scenario, using only one camera and one monaural microphone. Visual information is analyzed by a standard visual background/foreground (BG/FG) modelling module, enhanced with a novelty detection stage, and coupled with an audio BG/FG modelling scheme. The audiovisual association is performed on-line, by exploiting the concept of synchrony. Experimental tests carrying out classification and clustering of events show all the potentialities of the proposed approach, also in comparison with the results obtained by using the single modalities

Systematic comparison of BIC-based speaker segmentation systems

Unsupervised speaker change detection is addressed in this paper. Three speaker segmentation systems are examined. The first system investigates the AudioSpectrumCentroid and the AudioWaveformEnvelope features, implements a dynamic fusion scheme, and applies the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC). The second system consists of three modules. In the first module, a second-order statistic-measure is extracted; the Euclidean distance and the T2 Hotelling statistic are applied sequentially in the second module; and BIC is utilized in the third module. The third system, first uses a metric-based approach, in order to detect potential speaker change points, and then the BIC criterion is applied to validate the previously detected change points. Experiments are carried out on a dataset, which is created by concatenating speakers from the TIMIT database. A systematic performance comparison among the three systems is carried out by means of one-way ANOVA method and post hoc Tukey’s method

Towards Music Structural Segmentation across Genres: Features, Structural Hypotheses, and Annotation Principles

This work is supported by China Scholarship Council (CSC) and EPSRC project (EP/L019981/1) Fusing Semantic and Audio Technologies for Intelligent Music Production and Consumption (FAST-IMPACt). Sandler acknowledges the support of the Royal Society as a recipient of a Wolfson Research Merit Award