22,200 research outputs found
Perceptions and predictions of expertise in advanced musical learners
The aim of this article was to compare musicians' views on (a) the importance of musical skills and (b) the nature of expertise. Data were obtained from a specially devised web-based questionnaire completed by advanced musicians representing four musical genres (classical, popular, jazz, Scottish traditional) and varying degrees of professional musical experience (tertiary education music students, portfolio career musicians). Comparisons were made across musical genres (classical vs. other-than-classical), gender, age and professional status (student musicians vs. portfolio career musicians). Musicians' 'ideal' versus 'perceived' levels of musical skills and expertise were also compared and factors predicting musicians' self-reported level of skills and expertise were investigated. Findings suggest that the perception of expertise in advanced musical learners is a complex phenomenon that relates to each of four key variables (gender, age, musical genre and professional experience). The study also shows that discrepancies between advanced musicians' ideal and self-assessed levels of musical skills and expertise are closely related to gender and professional experience. Finally, characteristics that predict and account for variability in musicians' views and attitudes regarding musical expertise and self-assessments of personal expertise levels are highlighted. Results are viewed in the context of music learning and implications for music education are discussed
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
Predicting Audio Advertisement Quality
Online audio advertising is a particular form of advertising used abundantly
in online music streaming services. In these platforms, which tend to host tens
of thousands of unique audio advertisements (ads), providing high quality ads
ensures a better user experience and results in longer user engagement.
Therefore, the automatic assessment of these ads is an important step toward
audio ads ranking and better audio ads creation. In this paper we propose one
way to measure the quality of the audio ads using a proxy metric called Long
Click Rate (LCR), which is defined by the amount of time a user engages with
the follow-up display ad (that is shown while the audio ad is playing) divided
by the impressions. We later focus on predicting the audio ad quality using
only acoustic features such as harmony, rhythm, and timbre of the audio,
extracted from the raw waveform. We discuss how the characteristics of the
sound can be connected to concepts such as the clarity of the audio ad message,
its trustworthiness, etc. Finally, we propose a new deep learning model for
audio ad quality prediction, which outperforms the other discussed models
trained on hand-crafted features. To the best of our knowledge, this is the
first large-scale audio ad quality prediction study.Comment: WSDM '18 Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM International Conference on
Web Search and Data Mining, 9 page
FMA: A Dataset For Music Analysis
We introduce the Free Music Archive (FMA), an open and easily accessible
dataset suitable for evaluating several tasks in MIR, a field concerned with
browsing, searching, and organizing large music collections. The community's
growing interest in feature and end-to-end learning is however restrained by
the limited availability of large audio datasets. The FMA aims to overcome this
hurdle by providing 917 GiB and 343 days of Creative Commons-licensed audio
from 106,574 tracks from 16,341 artists and 14,854 albums, arranged in a
hierarchical taxonomy of 161 genres. It provides full-length and high-quality
audio, pre-computed features, together with track- and user-level metadata,
tags, and free-form text such as biographies. We here describe the dataset and
how it was created, propose a train/validation/test split and three subsets,
discuss some suitable MIR tasks, and evaluate some baselines for genre
recognition. Code, data, and usage examples are available at
https://github.com/mdeff/fmaComment: ISMIR 2017 camera-read
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
Design and Evaluation of a Probabilistic Music Projection Interface
We describe the design and evaluation of a probabilistic
interface for music exploration and casual playlist generation.
Predicted subjective features, such as mood and
genre, inferred from low-level audio features create a 34-
dimensional feature space. We use a nonlinear dimensionality
reduction algorithm to create 2D music maps of
tracks, and augment these with visualisations of probabilistic
mappings of selected features and their uncertainty.
We evaluated the system in a longitudinal trial in users’
homes over several weeks. Users said they had fun with the
interface and liked the casual nature of the playlist generation.
Users preferred to generate playlists from a local
neighbourhood of the map, rather than from a trajectory,
using neighbourhood selection more than three times more
often than path selection. Probabilistic highlighting of subjective
features led to more focused exploration in mouse
activity logs, and 6 of 8 users said they preferred the probabilistic
highlighting mode
A Deep Representation for Invariance And Music Classification
Representations in the auditory cortex might be based on mechanisms similar
to the visual ventral stream; modules for building invariance to
transformations and multiple layers for compositionality and selectivity. In
this paper we propose the use of such computational modules for extracting
invariant and discriminative audio representations. Building on a theory of
invariance in hierarchical architectures, we propose a novel, mid-level
representation for acoustical signals, using the empirical distributions of
projections on a set of templates and their transformations. Under the
assumption that, by construction, this dictionary of templates is composed from
similar classes, and samples the orbit of variance-inducing signal
transformations (such as shift and scale), the resulting signature is
theoretically guaranteed to be unique, invariant to transformations and stable
to deformations. Modules of projection and pooling can then constitute layers
of deep networks, for learning composite representations. We present the main
theoretical and computational aspects of a framework for unsupervised learning
of invariant audio representations, empirically evaluated on music genre
classification.Comment: 5 pages, CBMM Memo No. 002, (to appear) IEEE 2014 International
Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2014
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