Tune in to your emotions: a robust personalized affective music player

The emotional power of music is exploited in a personalized affective music player (AMP) that selects music for mood enhancement. A biosignal approach is used to measure listeners’ personal emotional reactions to their own music as input for affective user models. Regression and kernel density estimation are applied to model the physiological changes the music elicits. Using these models, personalized music selections based on an affective goal state can be made. The AMP was validated in real-world trials over the course of several weeks. Results show that our models can cope with noisy situations and handle large inter-individual differences in the music domain. The AMP augments music listening where its techniques enable automated affect guidance. Our approach provides valuable insights for affective computing and user modeling, for which the AMP is a suitable carrier application

The Audio Degradation Toolbox and its Application to Robustness Evaluation

We introduce the Audio Degradation Toolbox (ADT) for the controlled degradation of audio signals, and propose its usage as a means of evaluating and comparing the robustness of audio processing algorithms. Music recordings encountered in practical applications are subject to varied, sometimes unpredictable degradation. For example, audio is degraded by low-quality microphones, noisy recording environments, MP3 compression, dynamic compression in broadcasting or vinyl decay. In spite of this, no standard software for the degradation of audio exists, and music processing methods are usually evaluated against clean data. The ADT fills this gap by providing Matlab scripts that emulate a wide range of degradation types. We describe 14 degradation units, and how they can be chained to create more complex, `real-world' degradations. The ADT also provides functionality to adjust existing ground-truth, correcting for temporal distortions introduced by degradation. Using four different music informatics tasks, we show that performance strongly depends on the combination of method and degradation applied. We demonstrate that specific degradations can reduce or even reverse the performance difference between two competing methods. ADT source code, sounds, impulse responses and definitions are freely available for download

Multichannel sparse recovery of complex-valued signals using Huber's criterion

In this paper, we generalize Huber's criterion to multichannel sparse recovery problem of complex-valued measurements where the objective is to find good recovery of jointly sparse unknown signal vectors from the given multiple measurement vectors which are different linear combinations of the same known elementary vectors. This requires careful characterization of robust complex-valued loss functions as well as Huber's criterion function for the multivariate sparse regression problem. We devise a greedy algorithm based on simultaneous normalized iterative hard thresholding (SNIHT) algorithm. Unlike the conventional SNIHT method, our algorithm, referred to as HUB-SNIHT, is robust under heavy-tailed non-Gaussian noise conditions, yet has a negligible performance loss compared to SNIHT under Gaussian noise. Usefulness of the method is illustrated in source localization application with sensor arrays.Comment: To appear in CoSeRa'15 (Pisa, Italy, June 16-19, 2015). arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1502.0244