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

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

Mosquito Detection with Neural Networks: The Buzz of Deep Learning

Many real-world time-series analysis problems are characterised by scarce data. Solutions typically rely on hand-crafted features extracted from the time or frequency domain allied with classification or regression engines which condition on this (often low-dimensional) feature vector. The huge advances enjoyed by many application domains in recent years have been fuelled by the use of deep learning architectures trained on large data sets. This paper presents an application of deep learning for acoustic event detection in a challenging, data-scarce, real-world problem. Our candidate challenge is to accurately detect the presence of a mosquito from its acoustic signature. We develop convolutional neural networks (CNNs) operating on wavelet transformations of audio recordings. Furthermore, we interrogate the network's predictive power by visualising statistics of network-excitatory samples. These visualisations offer a deep insight into the relative informativeness of components in the detection problem. We include comparisons with conventional classifiers, conditioned on both hand-tuned and generic features, to stress the strength of automatic deep feature learning. Detection is achieved with performance metrics significantly surpassing those of existing algorithmic methods, as well as marginally exceeding those attained by individual human experts.Comment: For data and software related to this paper, see http://humbug.ac.uk/kiskin2017/. Submitted as a conference paper to ECML 201