Automatic music transcription: challenges and future directions

Automatic music transcription is considered by many to be a key enabling technology in music signal processing. However, the performance of transcription systems is still significantly below that of a human expert, and accuracies reported in recent years seem to have reached a limit, although the field is still very active. In this paper we analyse limitations of current methods and identify promising directions for future research. Current transcription methods use general purpose models which are unable to capture the rich diversity found in music signals. One way to overcome the limited performance of transcription systems is to tailor algorithms to specific use-cases. Semi-automatic approaches are another way of achieving a more reliable transcription. Also, the wealth of musical scores and corresponding audio data now available are a rich potential source of training data, via forced alignment of audio to scores, but large scale utilisation of such data has yet to be attempted. Other promising approaches include the integration of information from multiple algorithms and different musical aspects

16th Sound and Music Computing Conference SMC 2019 (28–31 May 2019, Malaga, Spain)

The 16th Sound and Music Computing Conference (SMC 2019) took place in Malaga, Spain, 28-31 May 2019 and it was organized by the Application of Information and Communication Technologies Research group (ATIC) of the University of Malaga (UMA). The SMC 2019 associated Summer School took place 25-28 May 2019. The First International Day of Women in Inclusive Engineering, Sound and Music Computing Research (WiSMC 2019) took place on 28 May 2019. The SMC 2019 TOPICS OF INTEREST included a wide selection of topics related to acoustics, psychoacoustics, music, technology for music, audio analysis, musicology, sonification, music games, machine learning, serious games, immersive audio, sound synthesis, etc

Content-based music structure analysis

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Towards Music Structural Segmentation across Genres: Features, Structural Hypotheses, and Annotation Principles

This work is supported by China Scholarship Council (CSC) and EPSRC project (EP/L019981/1) Fusing Semantic and Audio Technologies for Intelligent Music Production and Consumption (FAST-IMPACt). Sandler acknowledges the support of the Royal Society as a recipient of a Wolfson Research Merit Award

The Computational Analysis of Harmony in Western Art Music.

PhDThis thesis describes research in the computational analysis of harmony in western art music, focussing particularly on improving the accuracy and information-richness of key and chord extraction from digital score data. It is argued that a greater sophistication in automatic harmony analysis is an important contribution to the field of computational musicology. Initial experiments use hidden Markov models to predict key and modulation from automatically labelled chord sequences. Model parameters are based on heuristically formulated chord and key weightings derived from Sch¨onberg’s harmonic theory and the key and chord ratings resulting from perceptual experiments with listeners. The music theory models are shown to outperform the perceptual models both in terms of key accuracy and modelling the precise moment of key change. All of the models perform well enough to generate descriptive data about modulatory frequency, modulatory type and key distance. A robust method of classifying underlying chord types from elaborated keyboard music is then detailed. The method successfully distinguishes between essential and inessential notes, for example, passing notes and neighbour notes, and combines note classification information with tertian chord potential to measure the harmonic importance of a note. Existing approaches to automatic chord classification are unsuitable for use with complex textures and are restricted to triads and simple sevenths. An important goal is therefore to recognise a much broader set of chords, including complex chord types such as 9ths, 11ths and 13ths. This level of detail is necessary if the methods are to supply sophisticated information about the harmonic techniques of composers. Testing on the first twenty-four preludes of J. S. Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier, hand annotated by the author, a state of the art approach achieves 22.1% accuracy; our method achieves 55% accuracy.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) DTA studentship

A neuropsychophilosophical investigation of musical improvisation

Musical improvisation, spontaneous and creative play with musical materials, offers opportunities to understand aspects of creative cognition and of the human condition in navigating an unpredictable world. This research investigated the role of auditory imagery, the imagination of the sound of the music, in improvisation. Two complementary approaches were adopted. The first addressed improvisers’ experience with a focus on the role of auditory imagery and its relationship to their views on improvisation, mind and body, using qualitative interview and survey methods. Two studies were carried out with findings that suggest that anticipatory auditory imagery is regarded as an essential element which validates improvisation as a creative practice. The second approach investigated the embodied aspect of anticipatory imagery in an experimental setting. A new guitar-based altered auditory feedback paradigm was developed to find out about the effects of the familiarity of hand shape on judgements of sonic congruence. These new findings suggest that judgements of how a guitar chord will sound partly depend on the familiarity of the hand shape used to play them. The implications of these findings for the role of auditory imagery in improvisation were considered in the context of tensions between the ethnographic and scientific perspectives. This thesis concludes by advocating a rejection of Cartesian dualist conceptions of creativity in favour of an embodied ecological account which can reconcile the findings of cognitive science with improvisers’ experience and valuing of what they do

Real-time online musical collaboration system for Indian percussion

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 111-119).Thanks to the Internet, musicians located in different countries can now aspire to play with each other almost as if they were in the same room. However, the time delays due to the inherent latency in computer networks (up to several hundreds of milliseconds over long distances) are unsuitable for musical applications. Some musical collaboration systems address this issue by transmitting compressed audio streams (such as MP3) over low-latency and high-bandwidth networks (e.g. LANs or Internet2) to constrain time delays and optimize musician synchronization. Other systems, on the contrary, increase time delays to a musically-relevant value like one phrase, or one chord progression cycle, and then play it in a loop, thereby constraining the music being performed. In this thesis I propose TablaNet, a real-time online musical collaboration system for the tabla, a pair of North Indian hand drums. This system is based on a novel approach that combines machine listening and machine learning. Trained for a particular instrument, here the tabla, the system recognizes individual drum strokes played by the musician and sends them as symbols over the network. A computer at the receiving end identifies the musical structure from the incoming sequence of symbols by mapping them dynamically to known musical constructs. To deal with transmission delays, the receiver predicts the next events by analyzing previous patterns before receiving the original events, and synthesizes an audio output estimate with the appropriate timing. Although prediction approximations may result in a slightly different musical experience at both ends, we find that this system demonstrates a fair level of playability by tabla players of various levels, and functions well as an educational tool.by Mihir Sarkar.S.M

BA

thesisThis study seeks to understand the genesis of politically charged, or "conscious" hip-hop from a social, cultural, and political standpoint. It seeks to identify the convergent elements that fostered the development of hip-hop as an expression of urban black and Latino culture. It will place a special emphasis on the role poverty and economic conditions played in hip-hop's birth, the course of its development, and its discursive reflections. However, the study points out a strand of hip-hop that transcended mere social realism to produce a political message and was often a direct response to the policy and agenda of the Reagan and Bush administrations. At the climax of a march toward conservatism in America, the Reagan-Bush years embodied policy changes that incorporated a more conservative philosophy, to which the concerns of urban blacks often stood at odds. This new conservatism sought to rescind the policies of the liberal state, a large benefactor for the urban poor. Hip-hop developed into one of the few outlets for both cultural expression and political discourse for urban blacks and Latinos. Elements contained in various hip-hop songs directly respond to specific policies of the neo-conservative movement. Specific themes include crime, drugs, police repression, education, the military, and, most importantly, economics, which tends to be of overarching concern for all other themes. Together, specific messages contained in rap music produce a powerful dialectic that gives voice to many of those left by the wayside as the conservative political machine marched forward into the nineties, without much inclusion of black America. As urban blacks became more and more politically marginalized, rap gave voice to a generation that otherwise would not have had as loud a voice in American politics. Today, hip-hop culture pervades American life, and occupies a central role in American culture. This study examines the era when hip-hop first made headlines not only in the cultural arena, but also the political arena. The convergence of these two theaters climaxed in the "culture wars" over the censorship of rap music, from which hip-hop survived intact to ascend to the prominent position it currently occupies in American society. Without the early contributions of artists that sought to defy America's power structure, hip-hop may not have assumed such preeminence in mainstream (and underground) America