Multiscale approaches to music audio feature learning

Content-based music information retrieval tasks are typically solved with a two-stage approach: features are extracted from music audio signals, and are then used as input to a regressor or classifier. These features can be engineered or learned from data. Although the former approach was dominant in the past, feature learning has started to receive more attention from the MIR community in recent years. Recent results in feature learning indicate that simple algorithms such as K-means can be very effective, sometimes surpassing more complicated approaches based on restricted Boltzmann machines, autoencoders or sparse coding. Furthermore, there has been increased interest in multiscale representations of music audio recently. Such representations are more versatile because music audio exhibits structure on multiple timescales, which are relevant for different MIR tasks to varying degrees. We develop and compare three approaches to multiscale audio feature learning using the spherical K-means algorithm. We evaluate them in an automatic tagging task and a similarity metric learning task on the Magnatagatune dataset

Sequential Complexity as a Descriptor for Musical Similarity

We propose string compressibility as a descriptor of temporal structure in audio, for the purpose of determining musical similarity. Our descriptors are based on computing track-wise compression rates of quantised audio features, using multiple temporal resolutions and quantisation granularities. To verify that our descriptors capture musically relevant information, we incorporate our descriptors into similarity rating prediction and song year prediction tasks. We base our evaluation on a dataset of 15500 track excerpts of Western popular music, for which we obtain 7800 web-sourced pairwise similarity ratings. To assess the agreement among similarity ratings, we perform an evaluation under controlled conditions, obtaining a rank correlation of 0.33 between intersected sets of ratings. Combined with bag-of-features descriptors, we obtain performance gains of 31.1% and 10.9% for similarity rating prediction and song year prediction. For both tasks, analysis of selected descriptors reveals that representing features at multiple time scales benefits prediction accuracy.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures, 8 tables. Accepted versio

Apprentissage de représentations musicales à l'aide d'architectures profondes et multiéchelles

L'apprentissage machine (AM) est un outil important dans le domaine de la recherche d'information musicale (Music Information Retrieval ou MIR). De nombreuses tâches de MIR peuvent être résolues en entraînant un classifieur sur un ensemble de caractéristiques. Pour les tâches de MIR se basant sur l'audio musical, il est possible d'extraire de l'audio les caractéristiques pertinentes à l'aide de méthodes traitement de signal. Toutefois, certains aspects musicaux sont difficiles à extraire à l'aide de simples heuristiques. Afin d'obtenir des caractéristiques plus riches, il est possible d'utiliser l'AM pour apprendre une représentation musicale à partir de l'audio. Ces caractéristiques apprises permettent souvent d'améliorer la performance sur une tâche de MIR donnée. Afin d'apprendre des représentations musicales intéressantes, il est important de considérer les aspects particuliers à l'audio musical dans la conception des modèles d'apprentissage. Vu la structure temporelle et spectrale de l'audio musical, les représentations profondes et multiéchelles sont particulièrement bien conçues pour représenter la musique. Cette thèse porte sur l'apprentissage de représentations de l'audio musical. Des modèles profonds et multiéchelles améliorant l'état de l'art pour des tâches telles que la reconnaissance d'instrument, la reconnaissance de genre et l'étiquetage automatique y sont présentés.Machine learning (ML) is an important tool in the field of music information retrieval (MIR). Many MIR tasks can be solved by training a classifier over a set of features. For MIR tasks based on music audio, it is possible to extract features from the audio with signal processing techniques. However, some musical aspects are hard to extract with simple heuristics. To obtain richer features, we can use ML to learn a representation from the audio. These learned features can often improve performance for a given MIR task. In order to learn interesting musical representations, it is important to consider the particular aspects of music audio when building learning models. Given the temporal and spectral structure of music audio, deep and multi-scale representations are particularly well suited to represent music. This thesis focuses on learning representations from music audio. Deep and multi-scale models that improve the state-of-the-art for tasks such as instrument recognition, genre recognition and automatic annotation are presented