697 research outputs found
Genre-adaptive Semantic Computing and Audio-based Modelling for Music Mood Annotation
This study investigates whether taking genre into account is beneficial for automatic music mood annotation in terms of core affects valence, arousal, and tension, as well as several other mood scales. Novel techniques employing genre-adaptive semantic computing and audio-based modelling are proposed. A technique called the ACTwg employs genre-adaptive semantic computing of mood-related social tags, whereas ACTwg-SLPwg combines semantic computing and audio-based modelling, both in a genre-adaptive manner. The proposed techniques are experimentally evaluated at predicting listener ratings related to a set of 600 popular music tracks spanning multiple genres. The results show that ACTwg outperforms a semantic computing technique that does not exploit genre information, and ACTwg-SLPwg outperforms conventional techniques and other genre-adaptive alternatives. In particular, improvements in the prediction rates are obtained for the valence dimension which is typically the most challenging core affect dimension for audio-based annotation. The specificity of genre categories is not crucial for the performance of ACTwg-SLPwg. The study also presents analytical insights into inferring a concise tag-based genre representation for genre-adaptive music mood analysis
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
Examining Emotion Perception Agreement in Live Music Performance
Current music emotion recognition (MER) systems rely on emotion data averaged across listeners and over time to infer the emotion expressed by a musical piece, often neglecting time- and listener-dependent factors. These limitations can restrict the efficacy of MER systems and cause misjudgements. In a live music concert setting, fifteen audience members annotated perceived emotion in valence-arousal space over time using a mobile application. Analyses of inter-rater reliability yielded widely varying levels of agreement in the perceived emotions. A follow-up lab study to uncover the reasons for such variability was conducted, where twenty-one listeners annotated their perceived emotions through a recording of the original performance and offered open-ended explanations. Thematic analysis reveals many salient features and interpretations that can describe the cognitive processes. Some of the results confirm known findings of music perception and MER studies. Novel findings highlight the importance of less frequently discussed musical attributes, such as musical structure, performer expression, and stage setting, as perceived across different modalities. Musicians are found to attribute emotion change to musical harmony, structure, and performance technique more than non-musicians. We suggest that listener-informed musical features can benefit MER in addressing emotional perception variability by providing reasons for listener similarities and idiosyncrasies
Modelling affect for horror soundscapes
The feeling of horror within movies or games relies on the audience’s perception of a tense atmosphere — often achieved
through sound accompanied by the on-screen drama — guiding its emotional experience throughout the scene or game-play
sequence. These progressions are often crafted through an a priori knowledge of how a scene or game-play sequence will playout, and
the intended emotional patterns a game director wants to transmit. The appropriate design of sound becomes even more challenging
once the scenery and the general context is autonomously generated by an algorithm. Towards realizing sound-based affective
interaction in games this paper explores the creation of computational models capable of ranking short audio pieces based on
crowdsourced annotations of tension, arousal and valence. Affect models are trained via preference learning on over a thousand
annotations with the use of support vector machines, whose inputs are low-level features extracted from the audio assets of a
comprehensive sound library. The models constructed in this work are able to predict the tension, arousal and valence elicited by
sound, respectively, with an accuracy of approximately 65%, 66% and 72%.peer-reviewe
Affective Music Information Retrieval
Much of the appeal of music lies in its power to convey emotions/moods and to
evoke them in listeners. In consequence, the past decade witnessed a growing
interest in modeling emotions from musical signals in the music information
retrieval (MIR) community. In this article, we present a novel generative
approach to music emotion modeling, with a specific focus on the
valence-arousal (VA) dimension model of emotion. The presented generative
model, called \emph{acoustic emotion Gaussians} (AEG), better accounts for the
subjectivity of emotion perception by the use of probability distributions.
Specifically, it learns from the emotion annotations of multiple subjects a
Gaussian mixture model in the VA space with prior constraints on the
corresponding acoustic features of the training music pieces. Such a
computational framework is technically sound, capable of learning in an online
fashion, and thus applicable to a variety of applications, including
user-independent (general) and user-dependent (personalized) emotion
recognition and emotion-based music retrieval. We report evaluations of the
aforementioned applications of AEG on a larger-scale emotion-annotated corpora,
AMG1608, to demonstrate the effectiveness of AEG and to showcase how
evaluations are conducted for research on emotion-based MIR. Directions of
future work are also discussed.Comment: 40 pages, 18 figures, 5 tables, author versio
The GTZAN dataset: Its contents, its faults, their effects on evaluation, and its future use
The GTZAN dataset appears in at least 100 published works, and is the
most-used public dataset for evaluation in machine listening research for music
genre recognition (MGR). Our recent work, however, shows GTZAN has several
faults (repetitions, mislabelings, and distortions), which challenge the
interpretability of any result derived using it. In this article, we disprove
the claims that all MGR systems are affected in the same ways by these faults,
and that the performances of MGR systems in GTZAN are still meaningfully
comparable since they all face the same faults. We identify and analyze the
contents of GTZAN, and provide a catalog of its faults. We review how GTZAN has
been used in MGR research, and find few indications that its faults have been
known and considered. Finally, we rigorously study the effects of its faults on
evaluating five different MGR systems. The lesson is not to banish GTZAN, but
to use it with consideration of its contents.Comment: 29 pages, 7 figures, 6 tables, 128 reference
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