42,061 research outputs found
Music-inspired texture representation.
Techniques for music recommendation are increasingly relying on hybrid representations to retrieve new and exciting music. A key component of these representations is musical content, with texture being the most widely used feature. Current techniques for representing texture however are inspired by speech, not music, therefore music representations are not capturing the correct nature of musical texture. In this paper we investigate two parts of the well-established mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) representation: the resolution of mel-frequencies related to the resolution of musical notes; and how best to describe the shape of texture. Through contextualizing these parts, and their relationship to music, a novel music-inspired texture representation is developed. We evaluate this new texture representation by applying it to the task of music recommendation. We use the representation to build three recommendation models, based on current state-of-theart methods. Our results show that by understanding two key parts of texture representation, it is possible to achieve a significant recommendation improvement. This contribution of a music-inspired texture representation will not only improve content-based representation, but will allow hybrid systems to take advantage of a stronger content component
Audio style transfer
'Style transfer' among images has recently emerged as a very active research
topic, fuelled by the power of convolution neural networks (CNNs), and has
become fast a very popular technology in social media. This paper investigates
the analogous problem in the audio domain: How to transfer the style of a
reference audio signal to a target audio content? We propose a flexible
framework for the task, which uses a sound texture model to extract statistics
characterizing the reference audio style, followed by an optimization-based
audio texture synthesis to modify the target content. In contrast to mainstream
optimization-based visual transfer method, the proposed process is initialized
by the target content instead of random noise and the optimized loss is only
about texture, not structure. These differences proved key for audio style
transfer in our experiments. In order to extract features of interest, we
investigate different architectures, whether pre-trained on other tasks, as
done in image style transfer, or engineered based on the human auditory system.
Experimental results on different types of audio signal confirm the potential
of the proposed approach.Comment: ICASSP 2018 - 2018 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech
and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Apr 2018, Calgary, France. IEE
Audio Classification from Time-Frequency Texture
Time-frequency representations of audio signals often resemble texture
images. This paper derives a simple audio classification algorithm based on
treating sound spectrograms as texture images. The algorithm is inspired by an
earlier visual classification scheme particularly efficient at classifying
textures. While solely based on time-frequency texture features, the algorithm
achieves surprisingly good performance in musical instrument classification
experiments
Integrating content and semantic representations for music recommendation.
Music recommender systems are used by millions of people every day to discover new and exciting music. Central to making recommendations is the representation of each track, which may be used to calculate similarity. Content representations capture the musical and texture facets of each track, and semantic representations describe social and cultural information provided by listeners. This thesis is motivated by an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of both content and semantic representations. Content representations can be available for all tracks in a collection, but provide poor recommendation quality. Semantic representations suffer from the cold-start problem and are not available for all tracks, but provide good recommendation quality when a strong representation is available. These observations highlight the need to integrate both content and semantic representations, and use the strengths of each to improve music recommendation quality and discovery. A bridge of the gap between content and semantic representations is achieved in this thesis through hybrid representation. Content texture representations are examined, and a new music-inspired texture representation is defined. This content is integrated with semantic tags directly, and through a mid-level pseudo-tag representation. The effect of these approaches is to increase the high quality discovery of tracks, and to allow users to uncover interesting novel recommendations. The challenge of evaluating music recommendations when many tracks are undertagged is addressed. Implicit and explicit feedback provided by users is exploited to define a new ground truth similarity measure, which accurately reflects how different recommendation methods perform. A user study is conducted to evaluate both this measure, and the performance of integrated representations for recommending strong novel recommendations
A Compact and Discriminative Feature Based on Auditory Summary Statistics for Acoustic Scene Classification
One of the biggest challenges of acoustic scene classification (ASC) is to
find proper features to better represent and characterize environmental sounds.
Environmental sounds generally involve more sound sources while exhibiting less
structure in temporal spectral representations. However, the background of an
acoustic scene exhibits temporal homogeneity in acoustic properties, suggesting
it could be characterized by distribution statistics rather than temporal
details. In this work, we investigated using auditory summary statistics as the
feature for ASC tasks. The inspiration comes from a recent neuroscience study,
which shows the human auditory system tends to perceive sound textures through
time-averaged statistics. Based on these statistics, we further proposed to use
linear discriminant analysis to eliminate redundancies among these statistics
while keeping the discriminative information, providing an extreme com-pact
representation for acoustic scenes. Experimental results show the outstanding
performance of the proposed feature over the conventional handcrafted features.Comment: Accepted as a conference paper of Interspeech 201
Music Generation by Deep Learning - Challenges and Directions
In addition to traditional tasks such as prediction, classification and
translation, deep learning is receiving growing attention as an approach for
music generation, as witnessed by recent research groups such as Magenta at
Google and CTRL (Creator Technology Research Lab) at Spotify. The motivation is
in using the capacity of deep learning architectures and training techniques to
automatically learn musical styles from arbitrary musical corpora and then to
generate samples from the estimated distribution. However, a direct application
of deep learning to generate content rapidly reaches limits as the generated
content tends to mimic the training set without exhibiting true creativity.
Moreover, deep learning architectures do not offer direct ways for controlling
generation (e.g., imposing some tonality or other arbitrary constraints).
Furthermore, deep learning architectures alone are autistic automata which
generate music autonomously without human user interaction, far from the
objective of interactively assisting musicians to compose and refine music.
Issues such as: control, structure, creativity and interactivity are the focus
of our analysis. In this paper, we select some limitations of a direct
application of deep learning to music generation, analyze why the issues are
not fulfilled and how to address them by possible approaches. Various examples
of recent systems are cited as examples of promising directions.Comment: 17 pages. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with
arXiv:1709.01620. Accepted for publication in Special Issue on Deep learning
for music and audio, Neural Computing & Applications, Springer Nature, 201
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