1,689 research outputs found
Multiscale approaches to music audio feature learning
Content-based music information retrieval tasks are typically solved with a two-stage approach: features are extracted from music audio signals, and are then used as input to a regressor or classifier. These features can be engineered or learned from data. Although the former approach was dominant in the past, feature learning has started to receive more attention from the MIR community in recent years. Recent results in feature learning indicate that simple algorithms such as K-means can be very effective, sometimes surpassing more complicated approaches based on restricted Boltzmann machines, autoencoders or sparse coding. Furthermore, there has been increased interest in multiscale representations of music audio recently. Such representations are more versatile because music audio exhibits structure on multiple timescales, which are relevant for different MIR tasks to varying degrees. We develop and compare three approaches to multiscale audio feature learning using the spherical K-means algorithm. We evaluate them in an automatic tagging task and a similarity metric learning task on the Magnatagatune dataset
Listening to the World Improves Speech Command Recognition
We study transfer learning in convolutional network architectures applied to
the task of recognizing audio, such as environmental sound events and speech
commands. Our key finding is that not only is it possible to transfer
representations from an unrelated task like environmental sound classification
to a voice-focused task like speech command recognition, but also that doing so
improves accuracies significantly. We also investigate the effect of increased
model capacity for transfer learning audio, by first validating known results
from the field of Computer Vision of achieving better accuracies with
increasingly deeper networks on two audio datasets: UrbanSound8k and the newly
released Google Speech Commands dataset. Then we propose a simple multiscale
input representation using dilated convolutions and show that it is able to
aggregate larger contexts and increase classification performance. Further, the
models trained using a combination of transfer learning and multiscale input
representations need only 40% of the training data to achieve similar
accuracies as a freshly trained model with 100% of the training data. Finally,
we demonstrate a positive interaction effect for the multiscale input and
transfer learning, making a case for the joint application of the two
techniques.Comment: 8 page
Learning content-based metrics for music similarity
In this abstract, we propose a method to learn application-specific content-based metrics for music similarity using unsupervised feature learning and neighborhood components analysis. Multiple-timescale features extracted from music audio are embedded into a Euclidean metric space, so that the distance between songs reflects their similarity. We evaluated the method on the GTZAN and Magnatagatune datasets
Sequential Complexity as a Descriptor for Musical Similarity
We propose string compressibility as a descriptor of temporal structure in
audio, for the purpose of determining musical similarity. Our descriptors are
based on computing track-wise compression rates of quantised audio features,
using multiple temporal resolutions and quantisation granularities. To verify
that our descriptors capture musically relevant information, we incorporate our
descriptors into similarity rating prediction and song year prediction tasks.
We base our evaluation on a dataset of 15500 track excerpts of Western popular
music, for which we obtain 7800 web-sourced pairwise similarity ratings. To
assess the agreement among similarity ratings, we perform an evaluation under
controlled conditions, obtaining a rank correlation of 0.33 between intersected
sets of ratings. Combined with bag-of-features descriptors, we obtain
performance gains of 31.1% and 10.9% for similarity rating prediction and song
year prediction. For both tasks, analysis of selected descriptors reveals that
representing features at multiple time scales benefits prediction accuracy.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures, 8 tables. Accepted versio
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