34,492 research outputs found
The Audio Degradation Toolbox and its Application to Robustness Evaluation
We introduce the Audio Degradation Toolbox (ADT) for the controlled degradation of audio signals, and propose its usage as a means of evaluating and comparing the robustness of audio processing algorithms. Music recordings encountered in practical applications are subject to varied, sometimes unpredictable degradation. For example, audio is degraded by low-quality microphones, noisy recording environments, MP3 compression, dynamic compression in broadcasting or vinyl decay. In spite of this, no standard software for the degradation of audio exists, and music processing methods are usually evaluated against clean data. The ADT fills this gap by providing Matlab scripts that emulate a wide range of degradation types. We describe 14 degradation units, and how they can be chained to create more complex, `real-world' degradations. The ADT also provides functionality to adjust existing ground-truth, correcting for temporal distortions introduced by degradation. Using four different music informatics tasks, we show that performance strongly depends on the combination of method and degradation applied. We demonstrate that specific degradations can reduce or even reverse the performance difference between two competing methods. ADT source code, sounds, impulse responses and definitions are freely available for download
A Deep Representation for Invariance And Music Classification
Representations in the auditory cortex might be based on mechanisms similar
to the visual ventral stream; modules for building invariance to
transformations and multiple layers for compositionality and selectivity. In
this paper we propose the use of such computational modules for extracting
invariant and discriminative audio representations. Building on a theory of
invariance in hierarchical architectures, we propose a novel, mid-level
representation for acoustical signals, using the empirical distributions of
projections on a set of templates and their transformations. Under the
assumption that, by construction, this dictionary of templates is composed from
similar classes, and samples the orbit of variance-inducing signal
transformations (such as shift and scale), the resulting signature is
theoretically guaranteed to be unique, invariant to transformations and stable
to deformations. Modules of projection and pooling can then constitute layers
of deep networks, for learning composite representations. We present the main
theoretical and computational aspects of a framework for unsupervised learning
of invariant audio representations, empirically evaluated on music genre
classification.Comment: 5 pages, CBMM Memo No. 002, (to appear) IEEE 2014 International
Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2014
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