Comparison of input devices in an ISEE direct timbre manipulation task

The representation and manipulation of sound within multimedia systems is an important and currently under-researched area. The paper gives an overview of the authors' work on the direct manipulation of audio information, and describes a solution based upon the navigation of four-dimensional scaled timbre spaces. Three hardware input devices were experimentally evaluated for use in a timbre space navigation task: the Apple Standard Mouse, Gravis Advanced Mousestick II joystick (absolute and relative) and the Nintendo Power Glove. Results show that the usability of these devices significantly affected the efficacy of the system, and that conventional low-cost, low-dimensional devices provided better performance than the low-cost, multidimensional dataglove

Timbre-invariant Audio Features for Style Analysis of Classical Music

Copyright: (c) 2014 Christof Weiß et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

Perceptually smooth timbral guides by state-space analysis of phase-vocoder parameters

Sculptor is a phase-vocoder-based package of programs that allows users to explore timbral manipulation of sound in real time. It is the product of a research program seeking ultimately to perform gestural capture by analysis of the sound a performer makes using a conventional instrument. Since the phase-vocoder output is of high dimensionality — typically more than 1,000 channels per analysis frame—mapping phase-vocoder output to appropriate input parameters for a synthesizer is only feasible in theory

Polyphonic music information retrieval based on multi-label cascade classification system

Recognition and separation of sounds played by various instruments is very useful in labeling audio files with semantic information. This is a non-trivial task requiring sound analysis, but the results can aid automatic indexing and browsing music data when searching for melodies played by user specified instruments. Melody match based on pitch detection technology has drawn much attention and a lot of MIR systems have been developed to fulfill this task. However, musical instrument recognition remains an unsolved problem in the domain. Numerous approaches on acoustic feature extraction have already been proposed for timbre recognition. Unfortunately, none of those monophonic timbre estimation algorithms can be successfully applied to polyphonic sounds, which are the more usual cases in the real music world. This has stimulated the research on multi-labeled instrument classification and new features development for content-based automatic music information retrieval. The original audio signals are the large volume of unstructured sequential values, which are not suitable for traditional data mining algorithms; while the acoustical features are sometime not sufficient for instrument recognition in polyphonic sounds because they are higher-level representatives of raw signal lacking details of original information. In order to capture the patterns which evolve on the time scale, new temporal features are introduced to supply more temporal information for the timbre recognition. We will introduce the multi-labeled classification system to estimate multiple timbre information from the polyphonic sound by classification based on acoustic features and short-term power spectrum matching. In order to achieve higher estimation rate, we introduced the hierarchically structured cascade classification system under the inspiration of the human perceptual process. This cascade classification system makes a first estimate on the higher level decision attribute, which stands for the musical instrument family. Then, the further estimation is done within that specific family range. Experiments showed better performance of a hierarchical system than the traditional flat classification method which directly estimates the instrument without higher level of family information analysis. Traditional hierarchical structures were constructed in human semantics, which are meaningful from human perspective but not appropriate for the cascade system. We introduce the new hierarchical instrument schema according to the clustering results of the acoustic features. This new schema better describes the similarity among different instruments or among different playing techniques of the same instrument. The classification results show the higher accuracy of cascade system with the new schema compared to the traditional schemas. The query answering system is built based on the cascade classifier

Analyzing Visual Mappings of Traditional and Alternative Music Notation

In this paper, we postulate that combining the domains of information visualization and music studies paves the ground for a more structured analysis of the design space of music notation, enabling the creation of alternative music notations that are tailored to different users and their tasks. Hence, we discuss the instantiation of a design and visualization pipeline for music notation that follows a structured approach, based on the fundamental concepts of information and data visualization. This enables practitioners and researchers of digital humanities and information visualization, alike, to conceptualize, create, and analyze novel music notation methods. Based on the analysis of relevant stakeholders and their usage of music notation as a mean of communication, we identify a set of relevant features typically encoded in different annotations and encodings, as used by interpreters, performers, and readers of music. We analyze the visual mappings of musical dimensions for varying notation methods to highlight gaps and frequent usages of encodings, visual channels, and Gestalt laws. This detailed analysis leads us to the conclusion that such an under-researched area in information visualization holds the potential for fundamental research. This paper discusses possible research opportunities, open challenges, and arguments that can be pursued in the process of analyzing, improving, or rethinking existing music notation systems and techniques.Comment: 5 pages including references, 3rd Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities, Vis4DH, IEEE Vis 201