Statistical Machine Translation from Arab Vocal Improvisation to Instrumental Melodic Accompaniment

International audienceVocal improvisation is an essential practice in Arab music. The interactivity between the singer and the instru-mentalist(s) is a main feature of this deep-rooted musical form. As part of the interactivity, the instrumentalist re-capitulates, or translates, each vocal sentence upon its completion. In this paper, we present our own parallel corpus of instrumentally accompanied Arab vocal improvisation. The initial size of the corpus is 2779 parallel sentences. We discuss the process of building this corpus as well as the choice of data representation. We also present some statistics about the corpus. Then we present initial experiments on applying statistical machine translation to propose an automatic instrumental accompaniment to Arab vocal improvisation. The results with this small corpus, in comparison to classical machine translation of natural languages, are very promising: a BLEU of 24.62 from Vocal to instrumental and 24.07 from instrumental to vocal

Current Challenges and Visions in Music Recommender Systems Research

Music recommender systems (MRS) have experienced a boom in recent years, thanks to the emergence and success of online streaming services, which nowadays make available almost all music in the world at the user's fingertip. While today's MRS considerably help users to find interesting music in these huge catalogs, MRS research is still facing substantial challenges. In particular when it comes to build, incorporate, and evaluate recommendation strategies that integrate information beyond simple user--item interactions or content-based descriptors, but dig deep into the very essence of listener needs, preferences, and intentions, MRS research becomes a big endeavor and related publications quite sparse. The purpose of this trends and survey article is twofold. We first identify and shed light on what we believe are the most pressing challenges MRS research is facing, from both academic and industry perspectives. We review the state of the art towards solving these challenges and discuss its limitations. Second, we detail possible future directions and visions we contemplate for the further evolution of the field. The article should therefore serve two purposes: giving the interested reader an overview of current challenges in MRS research and providing guidance for young researchers by identifying interesting, yet under-researched, directions in the field

Cultural Context-Aware Models and IT Applications for the Exploitation of Musical Heritage

Information engineering has always expanded its scope by inspiring innovation in different scientific disciplines. In particular, in the last sixty years, music and engineering have forged a strong connection in the discipline known as “Sound and Music Computing”. Musical heritage is a paradigmatic case that includes several multi-faceted cultural artefacts and traditions. Several issues arise from the analog-digital transfer of cultural objects, concerning their creation, preservation, access, analysis and experiencing. The keystone is the relationship of these digitized cultural objects with their carrier and cultural context. The terms “cultural context” and “cultural context awareness” are delineated, alongside the concepts of contextual information and metadata. Since they maintain the integrity of the object, its meaning and cultural context, their role is critical. This thesis explores three main case studies concerning historical audio recordings and ancient musical instruments, aiming to delineate models to preserve, analyze, access and experience the digital versions of these three prominent examples of musical heritage. The first case study concerns analog magnetic tapes, and, in particular, tape music, a particular experimental music born in the second half of the XX century. This case study has relevant implications from the musicology, philology and archivists’ points of view, since the carrier has a paramount role and the tight connection with its content can easily break during the digitization process or the access phase. With the aim to help musicologists and audio technicians in their work, several tools based on Artificial Intelligence are evaluated in tasks such as the discontinuity detection and equalization recognition. By considering the peculiarities of tape music, the philological problem of stemmatics in digitized audio documents is tackled: an algorithm based on phylogenetic techniques is proposed and assessed, confirming the suitability of these techniques for this task. Then, a methodology for a historically faithful access to digitized tape music recordings is introduced, by considering contextual information and its relationship with the carrier and the replay device. Based on this methodology, an Android app which virtualizes a tape recorder is presented, together with its assessment. Furthermore, two web applications are proposed to faithfully experience digitized 78 rpm discs and magnetic tape recordings, respectively. Finally, a prototype of web application for musicological analysis is presented. This aims to concentrate relevant part of the knowledge acquired in this work into a single interface. The second case study is a corpus of Arab-Andalusian music, suitable for computational research, which opens new opportunities to musicological studies by applying data-driven analysis. The description of the corpus is based on the five criteria formalized in the CompMusic project of the University Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona: purpose, coverage, completeness, quality and re-usability. Four Jupyter notebooks were developed with the aim to provide a useful tool for computational musicologists for analyzing and using data and metadata of such corpus. The third case study concerns an exceptional historical musical instrument: an ancient Pan flute exhibited at the Museum of Archaeological Sciences and Art of the University of Padova. The final objective was the creation of a multimedia installation to valorize this precious artifact and to allow visitors to interact with the archaeological find and to learn its history. The case study provided the opportunity to study a methodology suitable for the valorization of this ancient musical instrument, but also extendible to other artifacts or museum collections. Both the methodology and the resulting multimedia installation are presented, followed by the assessment carried out by a multidisciplinary group of experts

Creating corpora for computational research in arab-andalusian music

Comunicació presentada al 1st International workshop on Digial Libraries for Musicology, que va tenir lloc el 12 de setembre de 2014 a Longres, Regne Unit.Research corpora are fundamental for the computational study of music. The design criteria with which to create them is a research task in itself. These corpora need to be well suited for the specific research problems to be addressed. Since these research problems are also shaped by musical, cultural and other specific aspects of the music traditions to be studied, the research corpora should take these specificities into account. In this paper we address the problems of creating corpora for computational research on Arab-Andalusian music, considering several relevant criteria for creating such corpora. We focus on the problems raised during the annotation process of the corpora, specifically the language issues surrounding this art music tradition. Following the criteria, we created a research corpus consisting of audio recordings with their corresponding metadata, lyrics and music scores. So far we have gathered 338 recordings from 3 different Arab-Andalusian music schools of Morocco, covering most of the musical modes, rhythms and forms of this art music tradition. The Arab-Andalusian corpus is accessible to the research community from a central online repository. Moreover, the audio recordings of this corpora are freely available through the Internet Archive repository. The Arab- Andalusian corpus can be used to generate test datasets, which can be used as ground truth to test several computational research tasks.The compilation of the corpora presented in this paper has been a collective effort of the members of the CompMusic project. The CompMusic project is funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (ERC grant agreement 267583)

Between Occitania and Al-Andalus: Reconsidering the Emergence of Troubadour Melody Through Algorithmic Analysis

How the musical and poetic traditions of the troubadours arose remains unknown, despite a century of scholarship that has attempted to account for their seemingly ex nihilo appearance in late twelfth-century Europe. Scholarly debate was particularly intense during the first half of the twentieth century and revolved around two competing theories: the Andalusi theory, which linked the troubadours to the poetic-musical traditions of medieval Muslim Iberia (also known by its Arabic name al-Andalus), and the Aquitanian theory, which argued that the troubadours were rooted in the folk and sacred traditions of the Aquitanian region. Since the 1980s, interest in the topic has mostly focused on new evidence that supports the Andalusi theory. However, because of the paucity of musical sources from al-Andalus and the first generation of troubadours, all scholarship on the topic has based itself upon isolated case studies of the lyric texts, extending conclusions drawn from textual analysis into the musical realm. This dissertation, by contrast, focuses upon the emergence of troubadour melody, using algorithmic analysis to perform a large comparative study of three repertoires: (1) the complete corpus of extant and complete troubadour melodies, (2) a sample of 158 melodies from contemporary unwritten Andalusi music of Morocco, and (3) 380 melodies from the sacred repertoires of Saint Martial of Limoges. I have used two of the most popular algorithms in bioinformatics – the Pairwise Sequence Alignment algorithm (PSA) and the Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) – to compare the melodies, and study common musical idioms. I found three melodic pairs between troubadour and contemporary Moroccan Andalusi melodies, thus demonstrating the existence of musical exchange between Occitania and al-Andalus. In addition, based on common musical idioms (such as common ways of beginning a melody and shared motives) found among all three traditions, I posit that the boundaries between the sacred and the secular were fluid, as both musical spheres drew on a pool of well-known unwritten melodies. Thus, I argue that the generic boundaries through which sacred and secular repertoires are theorized today are anachronistic. Finally, I reconstruct two proto-melodies of the troubadour tradition based on the common idioms found

Creating corpora for computational research in arab-andalusian music

Comunicació presentada al 1st International workshop on Digial Libraries for Musicology, que va tenir lloc el 12 de setembre de 2014 a Longres, Regne Unit.Research corpora are fundamental for the computational study of music. The design criteria with which to create them is a research task in itself. These corpora need to be well suited for the specific research problems to be addressed. Since these research problems are also shaped by musical, cultural and other specific aspects of the music traditions to be studied, the research corpora should take these specificities into account. In this paper we address the problems of creating corpora for computational research on Arab-Andalusian music, considering several relevant criteria for creating such corpora. We focus on the problems raised during the annotation process of the corpora, specifically the language issues surrounding this art music tradition. Following the criteria, we created a research corpus consisting of audio recordings with their corresponding metadata, lyrics and music scores. So far we have gathered 338 recordings from 3 different Arab-Andalusian music schools of Morocco, covering most of the musical modes, rhythms and forms of this art music tradition. The Arab-Andalusian corpus is accessible to the research community from a central online repository. Moreover, the audio recordings of this corpora are freely available through the Internet Archive repository. The Arab- Andalusian corpus can be used to generate test datasets, which can be used as ground truth to test several computational research tasks.The compilation of the corpora presented in this paper has been a collective effort of the members of the CompMusic project. The CompMusic project is funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (ERC grant agreement 267583)