Multimodal music information processing and retrieval: survey and future challenges

Towards improving the performance in various music information processing tasks, recent studies exploit different modalities able to capture diverse aspects of music. Such modalities include audio recordings, symbolic music scores, mid-level representations, motion, and gestural data, video recordings, editorial or cultural tags, lyrics and album cover arts. This paper critically reviews the various approaches adopted in Music Information Processing and Retrieval and highlights how multimodal algorithms can help Music Computing applications. First, we categorize the related literature based on the application they address. Subsequently, we analyze existing information fusion approaches, and we conclude with the set of challenges that Music Information Retrieval and Sound and Music Computing research communities should focus in the next years

Crowdsourcing Emotions in Music Domain

An important source of intelligence for music emotion recognition today comes from user-provided community tags about songs or artists. Recent crowdsourcing approaches such as harvesting social tags, design of collaborative games and web services or the use of Mechanical Turk, are becoming popular in the literature. They provide a cheap, quick and efficient method, contrary to professional labeling of songs which is expensive and does not scale for creating large datasets. In this paper we discuss the viability of various crowdsourcing instruments providing examples from research works. We also share our own experience, illustrating the steps we followed using tags collected from Last.fm for the creation of two music mood datasets which are rendered public. While processing affect tags of Last.fm, we observed that they tend to be biased towards positive emotions; the resulting dataset thus contain more positive songs than negative ones

MoodyLyrics: A Sentiment Annotated Lyrics Dataset

Music emotion recognition and recommendations today are changing the way people find and listen to their preferred musical tracks. Emotion recognition of songs is mostly based on feature extraction and learning from available datasets. In this work we take a different approach utilizing content words of lyrics and their valence and arousal norms in affect lexicons only. We use this method to annotate each song with one of the four emotion categories of Russell's model, and also to construct MoodyLyrics, a large dataset of lyrics that will be available for public use. For evaluation we utilized another lyrics dataset as ground truth and achieved an accuracy of 74.25 %. Our results confirm that valence is a better discriminator of mood than arousal. The results also prove that music mood recognition or annotation can be achieved with good accuracy even without subjective human feedback or user tags, when they are not available

Hybrid Approach for Emotion Classification of Audio Conversation Based on Text and Speech Mining

AbstractOne of the greatest challenges in speech technology is estimating the speaker's emotion. Most of the existing approaches concentrate either on audio or text features. In this work, we propose a novel approach for emotion classification of audio conversation based on both speech and text. The novelty in this approach is in the choice of features and the generation of a single feature vector for classification. Our main intention is to increase the accuracy of emotion classification of speech by considering both audio and text features. In this work we use standard methods such as Natural Language Processing, Support Vector Machines, WordNet Affect and SentiWordNet. The dataset for this work have been taken from Semval -2007 and eNTERFACE’05 EMOTION Database

Music emotion recognition: a multimodal machine learning approach

Music emotion recognition (MER) is an emerging domain of the Music Information Retrieval (MIR) scientific community, and besides, music searches through emotions are one of the major selection preferred by web users. As the world goes to digital, the musical contents in online databases, such as Last.fm have expanded exponentially, which require substantial manual efforts for managing them and also keeping them updated. Therefore, the demand for innovative and adaptable search mechanisms, which can be personalized according to users’ emotional state, has gained increasing consideration in recent years. This thesis concentrates on addressing music emotion recognition problem by presenting several classification models, which were fed by textual features, as well as audio attributes extracted from the music. In this study, we build both supervised and semisupervised classification designs under four research experiments, that addresses the emotional role of audio features, such as tempo, acousticness, and energy, and also the impact of textual features extracted by two different approaches, which are TF-IDF and Word2Vec. Furthermore, we proposed a multi-modal approach by using a combined feature-set consisting of the features from the audio content, as well as from context-aware data. For this purpose, we generated a ground truth dataset containing over 1500 labeled song lyrics and also unlabeled big data, which stands for more than 2.5 million Turkish documents, for achieving to generate an accurate automatic emotion classification system. The analytical models were conducted by adopting several algorithms on the crossvalidated data by using Python. As a conclusion of the experiments, the best-attained performance was 44.2% when employing only audio features, whereas, with the usage of textual features, better performances were observed with 46.3% and 51.3% accuracy scores considering supervised and semi-supervised learning paradigms, respectively. As of last, even though we created a comprehensive feature set with the combination of audio and textual features, this approach did not display any significant improvement for classification performanc

Music Information Retrieval: An Inspirational Guide to Transfer from Related Disciplines

The emerging field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) has been influenced by neighboring domains in signal processing and machine learning, including automatic speech recognition, image processing and text information retrieval. In this contribution, we start with concrete examples for methodology transfer between speech and music processing, oriented on the building blocks of pattern recognition: preprocessing, feature extraction, and classification/decoding. We then assume a higher level viewpoint when describing sources of mutual inspiration derived from text and image information retrieval. We conclude that dealing with the peculiarities of music in MIR research has contributed to advancing the state-of-the-art in other fields, and that many future challenges in MIR are strikingly similar to those that other research areas have been facing

Text-based Sentiment Analysis and Music Emotion Recognition

Nowadays, with the expansion of social media, large amounts of user-generated texts like tweets, blog posts or product reviews are shared online. Sentiment polarity analysis of such texts has become highly attractive and is utilized in recommender systems, market predictions, business intelligence and more. We also witness deep learning techniques becoming top performers on those types of tasks. There are however several problems that need to be solved for efficient use of deep neural networks on text mining and text polarity analysis. First of all, deep neural networks are data hungry. They need to be fed with datasets that are big in size, cleaned and preprocessed as well as properly labeled. Second, the modern natural language processing concept of word embeddings as a dense and distributed text feature representation solves sparsity and dimensionality problems of the traditional bag-of-words model. Still, there are various uncertainties regarding the use of word vectors: should they be generated from the same dataset that is used to train the model or it is better to source them from big and popular collections that work as generic text feature representations? Third, it is not easy for practitioners to find a simple and highly effective deep learning setup for various document lengths and types. Recurrent neural networks are weak with longer texts and optimal convolution-pooling combinations are not easily conceived. It is thus convenient to have generic neural network architectures that are effective and can adapt to various texts, encapsulating much of design complexity. This thesis addresses the above problems to provide methodological and practical insights for utilizing neural networks on sentiment analysis of texts and achieving state of the art results. Regarding the first problem, the effectiveness of various crowdsourcing alternatives is explored and two medium-sized and emotion-labeled song datasets are created utilizing social tags. One of the research interests of Telecom Italia was the exploration of relations between music emotional stimulation and driving style. Consequently, a context-aware music recommender system that aims to enhance driving comfort and safety was also designed. To address the second problem, a series of experiments with large text collections of various contents and domains were conducted. Word embeddings of different parameters were exercised and results revealed that their quality is influenced (mostly but not only) by the size of texts they were created from. When working with small text datasets, it is thus important to source word features from popular and generic word embedding collections. Regarding the third problem, a series of experiments involving convolutional and max-pooling neural layers were conducted. Various patterns relating text properties and network parameters with optimal classification accuracy were observed. Combining convolutions of words, bigrams, and trigrams with regional max-pooling layers in a couple of stacks produced the best results. The derived architecture achieves competitive performance on sentiment polarity analysis of movie, business and product reviews. Given that labeled data are becoming the bottleneck of the current deep learning systems, a future research direction could be the exploration of various data programming possibilities for constructing even bigger labeled datasets. Investigation of feature-level or decision-level ensemble techniques in the context of deep neural networks could also be fruitful. Different feature types do usually represent complementary characteristics of data. Combining word embedding and traditional text features or utilizing recurrent networks on document splits and then aggregating the predictions could further increase prediction accuracy of such models