2,766 research outputs found
Affective Music Information Retrieval
Much of the appeal of music lies in its power to convey emotions/moods and to
evoke them in listeners. In consequence, the past decade witnessed a growing
interest in modeling emotions from musical signals in the music information
retrieval (MIR) community. In this article, we present a novel generative
approach to music emotion modeling, with a specific focus on the
valence-arousal (VA) dimension model of emotion. The presented generative
model, called \emph{acoustic emotion Gaussians} (AEG), better accounts for the
subjectivity of emotion perception by the use of probability distributions.
Specifically, it learns from the emotion annotations of multiple subjects a
Gaussian mixture model in the VA space with prior constraints on the
corresponding acoustic features of the training music pieces. Such a
computational framework is technically sound, capable of learning in an online
fashion, and thus applicable to a variety of applications, including
user-independent (general) and user-dependent (personalized) emotion
recognition and emotion-based music retrieval. We report evaluations of the
aforementioned applications of AEG on a larger-scale emotion-annotated corpora,
AMG1608, to demonstrate the effectiveness of AEG and to showcase how
evaluations are conducted for research on emotion-based MIR. Directions of
future work are also discussed.Comment: 40 pages, 18 figures, 5 tables, author versio
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
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
UNDERSTANDING MUSIC TRACK POPULARITY IN A SOCIAL NETWORK
Thousands of music tracks are uploaded to the Internet every day through websites and social networks that focus on music. While some content has been popular for decades, some tracks that have just been released have been ignored. What makes a music track popular? Can the duration of a music track’s popularity be explained and predicted? By analysing data on the performance of a music track on the ranking charts, coupled with the creation of machine-generated music semantics constructs and a variety of other track, artist and market descriptors, this research tests a model to assess how track popularity and duration on the charts are determined. The dataset has 78,000+ track ranking observations from a streaming music service. The importance of music semantics constructs (genre, mood, instrumental, theme) for a track, and other non-musical factors, such as artist reputation and social information, are assessed. These may influence the staying power of music tracks in online social networks. The results show it is possible to explain chart popularity duration and the weekly ranking of music tracks. This research emphasizes the power of data analytics for knowledge discovery and explanation that can be achieved with a combination of machine-based and econometrics-based approaches
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