Computing Information Quantity as Similarity Measure for Music Classification Task

This paper proposes a novel method that can replace compression-based dissimilarity measure (CDM) in composer estimation task. The main features of the proposed method are clarity and scalability. First, since the proposed method is formalized by the information quantity, reproduction of the result is easier compared with the CDM method, where the result depends on a particular compression program. Second, the proposed method has a lower computational complexity in terms of the number of learning data compared with the CDM method. The number of correct results was compared with that of the CDM for the composer estimation task of five composers of 75 piano musical scores. The proposed method performed better than the CDM method that uses the file size compressed by a particular program.Comment: The 2017 International Conference On Advanced Informatics: Concepts, Theory And Application (ICAICTA2017

Acoustic Scene Classification

This work was supported by the Centre for Digital Music Platform (grant EP/K009559/1) and a Leadership Fellowship (EP/G007144/1) both from the United Kingdom Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

Measuring Expressive Music Performances: a Performance Science Model using Symbolic Approximation

Music Performance Science (MPS), sometimes termed systematic musicology in Northern Europe, is concerned with designing, testing and applying quantitative measurements to music performances. It has applications in art musics, jazz and other genres. It is least concerned with aesthetic judgements or with ontological considerations of artworks that stand alone from their instantiations in performances. Musicians deliver expressive performances by manipulating multiple, simultaneous variables including, but not limited to: tempo, acceleration and deceleration, dynamics, rates of change of dynamic levels, intonation and articulation. There are significant complexities when handling multivariate music datasets of significant scale. A critical issue in analyzing any types of large datasets is the likelihood of detecting meaningless relationships the more dimensions are included. One possible choice is to create algorithms that address both volume and complexity. Another, and the approach chosen here, is to apply techniques that reduce both the dimensionality and numerosity of the music datasets while assuring the statistical significance of results. This dissertation describes a flexible computational model, based on symbolic approximation of timeseries, that can extract time-related characteristics of music performances to generate performance fingerprints (dissimilarities from an ‘average performance’) to be used for comparative purposes. The model is applied to recordings of Arnold Schoenberg’s Phantasy for Violin with Piano Accompaniment, Opus 47 (1949), having initially been validated on Chopin Mazurkas.1 The results are subsequently used to test hypotheses about evolution in performance styles of the Phantasy since its composition. It is hoped that further research will examine other works and types of music in order to improve this model and make it useful to other music researchers. In addition to its benefits for performance analysis, it is suggested that the model has clear applications at least in music fraud detection, Music Information Retrieval (MIR) and in pedagogical applications for music education

The Influence of Training Method on Tone Colour Discrimination

This research addresses the question of whether one of two training methods, identification by continuous adjustment (ICA) or identification by successive approximation (ISA), is more effective in training students using a technical ear training program (TETP). No known empirical studies have examined the effectiveness of either training method within frequency spectrum-based student-targeted TETPs. Preliminary work involved the development of appropriate tests of students’ tone colour discrimination ability in isolation, on tasks sufficiently different from those encountered in TETPs. The tests were then deployed in a pilot study within a pre/post-training scenario using two groups of audio engineering students, one of which undertook an ICA and the other an ISA version of a TETP. These preliminary results indicated the suitability of a test that featured pairwise comparisons of synthetic percussive timbres to show differences in performance between the two training groups. This test was subsequently administered repeatedly in a full-scale study at regular intervals throughout a web-based TETP, in addition to before and after training. Results of the full-scale study showed the individual differences scaling (INDSCAL)-derived stimulus spaces for both groups were similar prior to undertaking the TETP. The ISA group’s post-training results were almost identical to their pre-training results, whereas the ICA groups’ post-training results showed minor, but insignificant differences. Although the full-scale study found insignificant differences in performance between training groups, the preliminary results suggest that the deployment of a pre/post-training test is an effective measure of the training method’s influence on students if the test features a task that is significantly different from those trained on in the TETP

A Fast Quartet Tree Heuristic for Hierarchical Clustering

The Minimum Quartet Tree Cost problem is to construct an optimal weight tree from the $3{n \choose 4}$ weighted quartet topologies on $n$ objects, where optimality means that the summed weight of the embedded quartet topologies is optimal (so it can be the case that the optimal tree embeds all quartets as nonoptimal topologies). We present a Monte Carlo heuristic, based on randomized hill climbing, for approximating the optimal weight tree, given the quartet topology weights. The method repeatedly transforms a dendrogram, with all objects involved as leaves, achieving a monotonic approximation to the exact single globally optimal tree. The problem and the solution heuristic has been extensively used for general hierarchical clustering of nontree-like (non-phylogeny) data in various domains and across domains with heterogeneous data. We also present a greatly improved heuristic, reducing the running time by a factor of order a thousand to ten thousand. All this is implemented and available, as part of the CompLearn package. We compare performance and running time of the original and improved versions with those of UPGMA, BioNJ, and NJ, as implemented in the SplitsTree package on genomic data for which the latter are optimized. Keywords: Data and knowledge visualization, Pattern matching--Clustering--Algorithms/Similarity measures, Hierarchical clustering, Global optimization, Quartet tree, Randomized hill-climbing,Comment: LaTeX, 40 pages, 11 figures; this paper has substantial overlap with arXiv:cs/0606048 in cs.D

An Investigation and Application of Biology and Bioinformatics for Activity Recognition

Activity recognition in a smart home context is inherently difficult due to the variable nature of human activities and tracking artifacts introduced by video-based tracking systems. This thesis addresses the activity recognition problem via introducing a biologically-inspired chemotactic approach and bioinformatics-inspired sequence alignment techniques to recognise spatial activities. The approaches are demonstrated in real world conditions to improve robustness and recognise activities in the presence of innate activity variability and tracking noise