17,658 research outputs found
Statistical Piano Reduction Controlling Performance Difficulty
We present a statistical-modelling method for piano reduction, i.e.
converting an ensemble score into piano scores, that can control performance
difficulty. While previous studies have focused on describing the condition for
playable piano scores, it depends on player's skill and can change continuously
with the tempo. We thus computationally quantify performance difficulty as well
as musical fidelity to the original score, and formulate the problem as
optimization of musical fidelity under constraints on difficulty values. First,
performance difficulty measures are developed by means of probabilistic
generative models for piano scores and the relation to the rate of performance
errors is studied. Second, to describe musical fidelity, we construct a
probabilistic model integrating a prior piano-score model and a model
representing how ensemble scores are likely to be edited. An iterative
optimization algorithm for piano reduction is developed based on statistical
inference of the model. We confirm the effect of the iterative procedure; we
find that subjective difficulty and musical fidelity monotonically increase
with controlled difficulty values; and we show that incorporating sequential
dependence of pitches and fingering motion in the piano-score model improves
the quality of reduction scores in high-difficulty cases.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, version accepted to APSIPA Transactions on
Signal and Information Processin
A Standardised Procedure for Evaluating Creative Systems: Computational Creativity Evaluation Based on What it is to be Creative
Computational creativity is a flourishing research area, with a variety of creative systems being produced and developed. Creativity evaluation has not kept pace with system development with an evident lack of systematic evaluation of the creativity of these systems in the literature. This is partially due to difficulties in defining what it means for a computer to be creative; indeed, there is no consensus on this for human creativity, let alone its computational equivalent. This paper proposes a Standardised Procedure for Evaluating Creative Systems (SPECS). SPECS is a three-step process: stating what it means for a particular computational system to be creative, deriving and performing tests based on these statements. To assist this process, the paper offers a collection of key components of creativity, identified empirically from discussions of human and computational creativity. Using this approach, the SPECS methodology is demonstrated through a comparative case study evaluating computational creativity systems that improvise music
Clustering by compression
We present a new method for clustering based on compression. The method
doesn't use subject-specific features or background knowledge, and works as
follows: First, we determine a universal similarity distance, the normalized
compression distance or NCD, computed from the lengths of compressed data files
(singly and in pairwise concatenation). Second, we apply a hierarchical
clustering method. The NCD is universal in that it is not restricted to a
specific application area, and works across application area boundaries. A
theoretical precursor, the normalized information distance, co-developed by one
of the authors, is provably optimal but uses the non-computable notion of
Kolmogorov complexity. We propose precise notions of similarity metric, normal
compressor, and show that the NCD based on a normal compressor is a similarity
metric that approximates universality. To extract a hierarchy of clusters from
the distance matrix, we determine a dendrogram (binary tree) by a new quartet
method and a fast heuristic to implement it. The method is implemented and
available as public software, and is robust under choice of different
compressors. To substantiate our claims of universality and robustness, we
report evidence of successful application in areas as diverse as genomics,
virology, languages, literature, music, handwritten digits, astronomy, and
combinations of objects from completely different domains, using statistical,
dictionary, and block sorting compressors. In genomics we presented new
evidence for major questions in Mammalian evolution, based on
whole-mitochondrial genomic analysis: the Eutherian orders and the Marsupionta
hypothesis against the Theria hypothesis.Comment: LaTeX, 27 pages, 20 figure
Social Visual Behavior Analytics for Autism Therapy of Children Based on Automated Mutual Gaze Detection
Social visual behavior, as a type of non-verbal communication, plays a
central role in studying social cognitive processes in interactive and complex
settings of autism therapy interventions. However, for social visual behavior
analytics in children with autism, it is challenging to collect gaze data
manually and evaluate them because it costs a lot of time and effort for human
coders. In this paper, we introduce a social visual behavior analytics approach
by quantifying the mutual gaze performance of children receiving play-based
autism interventions using an automated mutual gaze detection framework. Our
analysis is based on a video dataset that captures and records social
interactions between children with autism and their therapy trainers (N=28
observations, 84 video clips, 21 Hrs duration). The effectiveness of our
framework was evaluated by comparing the mutual gaze ratio derived from the
mutual gaze detection framework with the human-coded ratio values. We analyzed
the mutual gaze frequency and duration across different therapy settings,
activities, and sessions. We created mutual gaze-related measures for social
visual behavior score prediction using multiple machine learning-based
regression models. The results show that our method provides mutual gaze
measures that reliably represent (or even replace) the human coders' hand-coded
social gaze measures and effectively evaluates and predicts ASD children's
social visual performance during the intervention. Our findings have
implications for social interaction analysis in small-group behavior
assessments in numerous co-located settings in (special) education and in the
workplace.Comment: Accepted to IEEE/ACM international conference on Connected Health:
Applications, Systems and Engineering Technologies (CHASE) 202
Retrieval and Annotation of Music Using Latent Semantic Models
PhDThis thesis investigates the use of latent semantic models for annotation and
retrieval from collections of musical audio tracks. In particular latent semantic
analysis (LSA) and aspect models (or probabilistic latent semantic analysis,
pLSA) are used to index words in descriptions of music drawn from hundreds
of thousands of social tags. A new discrete audio feature representation is introduced
to encode musical characteristics of automatically-identified regions
of interest within each track, using a vocabulary of audio muswords. Finally a
joint aspect model is developed that can learn from both tagged and untagged
tracks by indexing both conventional words and muswords. This model is
used as the basis of a music search system that supports query by example and
by keyword, and of a simple probabilistic machine annotation system. The
models are evaluated by their performance in a variety of realistic retrieval
and annotation tasks, motivated by applications including playlist generation,
internet radio streaming, music recommendation and catalogue searchEngineering and Physical Sciences
Research Counci
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