57 research outputs found
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
Automatic transcription of polyphonic music exploiting temporal evolution
PhDAutomatic music transcription is the process of converting an audio recording
into a symbolic representation using musical notation. It has numerous applications
in music information retrieval, computational musicology, and the
creation of interactive systems. Even for expert musicians, transcribing polyphonic
pieces of music is not a trivial task, and while the problem of automatic
pitch estimation for monophonic signals is considered to be solved, the creation
of an automated system able to transcribe polyphonic music without setting
restrictions on the degree of polyphony and the instrument type still remains
open.
In this thesis, research on automatic transcription is performed by explicitly
incorporating information on the temporal evolution of sounds. First efforts address
the problem by focusing on signal processing techniques and by proposing
audio features utilising temporal characteristics. Techniques for note onset and
offset detection are also utilised for improving transcription performance. Subsequent
approaches propose transcription models based on shift-invariant probabilistic
latent component analysis (SI-PLCA), modeling the temporal evolution
of notes in a multiple-instrument case and supporting frequency modulations in
produced notes. Datasets and annotations for transcription research have also
been created during this work. Proposed systems have been privately as well as
publicly evaluated within the Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange
(MIREX) framework. Proposed systems have been shown to outperform several
state-of-the-art transcription approaches.
Developed techniques have also been employed for other tasks related to music
technology, such as for key modulation detection, temperament estimation,
and automatic piano tutoring. Finally, proposed music transcription models
have also been utilized in a wider context, namely for modeling acoustic scenes
Online Symbolic Music Alignment with Offline Reinforcement Learning
Symbolic Music Alignment is the process of matching performed MIDI notes to
corresponding score notes. In this paper, we introduce a reinforcement learning
(RL)-based online symbolic music alignment technique. The RL agent - an
attention-based neural network - iteratively estimates the current score
position from local score and performance contexts. For this symbolic alignment
task, environment states can be sampled exhaustively and the reward is dense,
rendering a formulation as a simplified offline RL problem straightforward. We
evaluate the trained agent in three ways. First, in its capacity to identify
correct score positions for sampled test contexts; second, as the core
technique of a complete algorithm for symbolic online note-wise alignment; and
finally, as a real-time symbolic score follower. We further investigate the
pitch-based score and performance representations used as the agent's inputs.
To this end, we develop a second model, a two-step Dynamic Time Warping
(DTW)-based offline alignment algorithm leveraging the same input
representation. The proposed model outperforms a state-of-the-art reference
model of offline symbolic music alignment
Sequential decision making in artificial musical intelligence
Over the past 60 years, artificial intelligence has grown from a largely academic field of research to a ubiquitous array of tools and approaches used in everyday technology. Despite its many recent successes and growing prevalence, certain meaningful facets of computational intelligence have not been as thoroughly explored. Such additional facets cover a wide array of complex mental tasks which humans carry out easily, yet are difficult for computers to mimic. A prime example of a domain in which human intelligence thrives, but machine understanding is still fairly limited, is music. Over the last decade, many researchers have applied computational tools to carry out tasks such as genre identification, music summarization, music database querying, and melodic segmentation. While these are all useful algorithmic solutions, we are still a long way from constructing complete music agents, able to mimic (at least partially) the complexity with which humans approach music. One key aspect which hasn't been sufficiently studied is that of sequential decision making in musical intelligence. This thesis strives to answer the following question: Can a sequential decision making perspective guide us in the creation of better music agents, and social agents in general? And if so, how? More specifically, this thesis focuses on two aspects of musical intelligence: music recommendation and human-agent (and more generally agent-agent) interaction in the context of music. The key contributions of this thesis are the design of better music playlist recommendation algorithms; the design of algorithms for tracking user preferences over time; new approaches for modeling people's behavior in situations that involve music; and the design of agents capable of meaningful interaction with humans and other agents in a setting where music plays a roll (either directly or indirectly). Though motivated primarily by music-related tasks, and focusing largely on people's musical preferences, this thesis also establishes that insights from music-specific case studies can also be applicable in other concrete social domains, such as different types of content recommendation. Showing the generality of insights from musical data in other contexts serves as evidence for the utility of music domains as testbeds for the development of general artificial intelligence techniques. Ultimately, this thesis demonstrates the overall usefulness of taking a sequential decision making approach in settings previously unexplored from this perspectiveComputer Science
Neural Networks for Analysing Music and Environmental Audio
PhDIn this thesis, we consider the analysis of music and environmental audio
recordings with neural networks. Recently, neural networks have been
shown to be an effective family of models for speech recognition, computer
vision, natural language processing and a number of other statistical modelling
problems. The composite layer-wise structure of neural networks
allows for flexible model design, where prior knowledge about the domain
of application can be used to inform the design and architecture of the
neural network models. Additionally, it has been shown that when trained
on sufficient quantities of data, neural networks can be directly applied to
low-level features to learn mappings to high level concepts like phonemes
in speech and object classes in computer vision. In this thesis we investigate
whether neural network models can be usefully applied to processing
music and environmental audio.
With regards to music signal analysis, we investigate 2 different problems.
The fi rst problem, automatic music transcription, aims to identify the
score or the sequence of musical notes that comprise an audio recording.
We also consider the problem of automatic chord transcription, where the
aim is to identify the sequence of chords in a given audio recording. For
both problems, we design neural network acoustic models which are applied
to low-level time-frequency features in order to detect the presence of
notes or chords. Our results demonstrate that the neural network acoustic
models perform similarly to state-of-the-art acoustic models, without the
need for any feature engineering. The networks are able to learn complex
transformations from time-frequency features to the desired outputs, given
sufficient amounts of training data. Additionally, we use recurrent neural
networks to model the temporal structure of sequences of notes or chords,
similar to language modelling in speech. Our results demonstrate that
the combination of the acoustic and language model predictions yields
improved performance over the acoustic models alone. We also observe
that convolutional neural networks yield better performance compared to
other neural network architectures for acoustic modelling.
For the analysis of environmental audio recordings, we consider the problem
of acoustic event detection. Acoustic event detection has a similar
structure to automatic music and chord transcription, where the system
is required to output the correct sequence of semantic labels along with
onset and offset times. We compare the performance of neural network
architectures against Gaussian mixture models and support vector machines.
In order to account for the fact that such systems are typically
deployed on embedded devices, we compare performance as a function of
the computational cost of each model. We evaluate the models on 2 large
datasets of real-world recordings of baby cries and smoke alarms. Our results
demonstrate that the neural networks clearly outperform the other
models and they are able to do so without incurring a heavy computation
cost
Signal Processing Methods for Music Synchronization, Audio Matching, and Source Separation
The field of music information retrieval (MIR) aims at developing techniques and tools for organizing, understanding, and searching multimodal information in large music collections in a robust, efficient and intelligent manner. In this context, this thesis presents novel, content-based methods for music synchronization, audio matching, and source separation. In general, music synchronization denotes a procedure which, for a given position in one representation of a piece of music, determines the corresponding position within another representation. Here, the thesis presents three complementary synchronization approaches, which improve upon previous methods in terms of robustness, reliability, and accuracy. The first approach employs a late-fusion strategy based on multiple, conceptually different alignment techniques to identify those music passages that allow for reliable alignment results. The second approach is based on the idea of employing musical structure analysis methods in the context of synchronization to derive reliable synchronization results even in the presence of structural differences between the versions to be aligned. Finally, the third approach employs several complementary strategies for increasing the accuracy and time resolution of synchronization results. Given a short query audio clip, the goal of audio matching is to automatically retrieve all musically similar excerpts in different versions and arrangements of the same underlying piece of music. In this context, chroma-based audio features are a well-established tool as they possess a high degree of invariance to variations in timbre. This thesis describes a novel procedure for making chroma features even more robust to changes in timbre while keeping their discriminative power. Here, the idea is to identify and discard timbre-related information using techniques inspired by the well-known MFCC features, which are usually employed in speech processing. Given a monaural music recording, the goal of source separation is to extract musically meaningful sound sources corresponding, for example, to a melody, an instrument, or a drum track from the recording. To facilitate this complex task, one can exploit additional information provided by a musical score. Based on this idea, this thesis presents two novel, conceptually different approaches to source separation. Using score information provided by a given MIDI file, the first approach employs a parametric model to describe a given audio recording of a piece of music. The resulting model is then used to extract sound sources as specified by the score. As a computationally less demanding and easier to implement alternative, the second approach employs the additional score information to guide a decomposition based on non-negative matrix factorization (NMF)
Computational Methods for the Alignment and Score-Informed Transcription of Piano Music
PhDThis thesis is concerned with computational methods for alignment and score-informed
transcription of piano music. Firstly, several methods are proposed to improve the alignment
robustness and accuracywhen various versions of one piece of music showcomplex
differences with respect to acoustic conditions or musical interpretation. Secondly, score
to performance alignment is applied to enable score-informed transcription.
Although music alignment methods have considerably improved in accuracy in recent
years, the task remains challenging. The research in this thesis aims to improve the
robustness for some cases where there are substantial differences between versions and
state-of-the-art methods may fail in identifying a correct alignment. This thesis first exploits
the availability of multiple versions of the piece to be aligned. By processing these
jointly, the alignment process can be stabilised by exploiting additional examples of how
a section might be interpreted or which acoustic conditions may arise. Two methods are
proposed, progressive alignment and profile HMM, both adapted from the multiple biological
sequence alignment task. Experiments demonstrate that these methods can indeed
improve the alignment accuracy and robustness over comparable pairwise methods.
Secondly, this thesis presents a score to performance alignment method that can improve
the robustness in cases where some musical voices, such as the melody, are played asynchronously
to others – a stylistic device used in musical expression. The asynchronies between
the melody and the accompaniment are handled by treating the voices as separate
timelines in a multi-dimensional variant of dynamic time warping (DTW). The method
measurably improves the alignment accuracy for pieces with asynchronous voices and
preserves the accuracy otherwise.
Once an accurate alignment between a score and an audio recording is available, the
score information can be exploited as prior knowledge in automatic music transcription
(AMT), for scenarios where score is available, such as music tutoring. Score-informed dictionary
learning is used to learn the spectral pattern of each pitch that describes the energy
distribution of the associated notes in the recording. More precisely, the dictionary learning
process in non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is constrained using the aligned
score. This way, by adapting the dictionary to a given recording, the proposed method
improves the accuracy over the state-of-the-art.China Scholarship Council
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