Generation of folk song melodies using Bayes transforms

The paper introduces the `Bayes transform', a mathematical procedure for putting data into a hierarchical representation. Applicable to any type of data, the procedure yields interesting results when applied to sequences. In this case, the representation obtained implicitly models the repetition hierarchy of the source. There are then natural applications to music. Derivation of Bayes transforms can be the means of determining the repetition hierarchy of note sequences (melodies) in an empirical and domain-general way. The paper investigates application of this approach to Folk Song, examining the results that can be obtained by treating such transforms as generative models

Deep neural networks with voice entry estimation heuristics for voice separation in symbolic music representations

In this study we explore the use of deep feedforward neural networks for voice separation in symbolic music representations. We experiment with different network architectures, varying the number and size of the hidden layers, and with dropout. We integrate two voice entry estimation heuristics that estimate the entry points of the individual voices in the polyphonic fabric into the models. These heuristics serve to reduce error propagation at the beginning of a piece, which, as we have shown in previous work, can seriously hamper model performance. The models are evaluated on the 48 fugues from Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier and his 30 inventions—a dataset that we curated and make publicly available. We find that a model with two hidden layers yields the best results. Using more layers does not lead to a significant performance improvement. Furthermore, we find that our voice entry estimation heuristics are highly effective in the reduction of error propagation, improving performance significantly. Our best-performing model outperforms our previous models, where the difference is significant, and, depending on the evaluation metric, performs close to or better than the reported state of the art

Deep Neural Networks for Document Processing of Music Score Images

[EN] There is an increasing interest in the automatic digitization of medieval music documents. Despite efforts in this field, the detection of the different layers of information on these documents still poses difficulties. The use of Deep Neural Networks techniques has reported outstanding results in many areas related to computer vision. Consequently, in this paper, we study the so-called Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for performing the automatic document processing of music score images. This process is focused on layering the image into its constituent parts (namely, background, staff lines, music notes, and text) by training a classifier with examples of these parts. A comprehensive experimentation in terms of the configuration of the networks was carried out, which illustrates interesting results as regards to both the efficiency and effectiveness of these models. In addition, a cross-manuscript adaptation experiment was presented in which the networks are evaluated on a different manuscript from the one they were trained. The results suggest that the CNN is capable of adapting its knowledge, and so starting from a pre-trained CNN reduces (or eliminates) the need for new labeled data.This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and Universidad de Alicante through grant GRE-16-04.Calvo-Zaragoza, J.; Castellanos, F.; Vigliensoni, G.; Fujinaga, I. (2018). Deep Neural Networks for Document Processing of Music Score Images. Applied Sciences. 8(5). https://doi.org/10.3390/app8050654S85Bainbridge, D., & Bell, T. (2001). Computers and the Humanities, 35(2), 95-121. doi:10.1023/a:1002485918032Byrd, D., & Simonsen, J. G. (2015). Towards a Standard Testbed for Optical Music Recognition: Definitions, Metrics, and Page Images. Journal of New Music Research, 44(3), 169-195. doi:10.1080/09298215.2015.1045424LeCun, Y., Bengio, Y., & Hinton, G. (2015). Deep learning. Nature, 521(7553), 436-444. doi:10.1038/nature14539Rebelo, A., Fujinaga, I., Paszkiewicz, F., Marcal, A. R. S., Guedes, C., & Cardoso, J. S. (2012). Optical music recognition: state-of-the-art and open issues. International Journal of Multimedia Information Retrieval, 1(3), 173-190. doi:10.1007/s13735-012-0004-6Louloudis, G., Gatos, B., Pratikakis, I., & Halatsis, C. (2008). Text line detection in handwritten documents. Pattern Recognition, 41(12), 3758-3772. doi:10.1016/j.patcog.2008.05.011Montagner, I. S., Hirata, N. S. T., & Hirata, R. (2017). Staff removal using image operator learning. Pattern Recognition, 63, 310-320. doi:10.1016/j.patcog.2016.10.002Calvo-Zaragoza, J., Micó, L., & Oncina, J. (2016). Music staff removal with supervised pixel classification. International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR), 19(3), 211-219. doi:10.1007/s10032-016-0266-2Calvo-Zaragoza, J., Pertusa, A., & Oncina, J. (2017). Staff-line detection and removal using a convolutional neural network. Machine Vision and Applications, 28(5-6), 665-674. doi:10.1007/s00138-017-0844-4Shelhamer, E., Long, J., & Darrell, T. (2017). Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 39(4), 640-651. doi:10.1109/tpami.2016.2572683Kato, Z. (2011). Markov Random Fields in Image Segmentation. Foundations and Trends® in Signal Processing, 5(1-2), 1-155. doi:10.1561/2000000035Lecun, Y., Bottou, L., Bengio, Y., & Haffner, P. (1998). Gradient-based learning applied to document recognition. Proceedings of the IEEE, 86(11), 2278-2324. doi:10.1109/5.72679

Synthesis of variable dancing styles based on a compact spatiotemporal representation of dance

Dance as a complex expressive form of motion is able to convey emotion, meaning and social idiosyncrasies that opens channels for non-verbal communication, and promotes rich cross-modal interactions with music and the environment. As such, realistic dancing characters may incorporate crossmodal information and variability of the dance forms through compact representations that may describe the movement structure in terms of its spatial and temporal organization. In this paper, we propose a novel method for synthesizing beatsynchronous dancing motions based on a compact topological model of dance styles, previously captured with a motion capture system. The model was based on the Topological Gesture Analysis (TGA) which conveys a discrete three-dimensional point-cloud representation of the dance, by describing the spatiotemporal variability of its gestural trajectories into uniform spherical distributions, according to classes of the musical meter. The methodology for synthesizing the modeled dance traces back the topological representations, constrained with definable metrical and spatial parameters, into complete dance instances whose variability is controlled by stochastic processes that considers both TGA distributions and the kinematic constraints of the body morphology. In order to assess the relevance and flexibility of each parameter into feasibly reproducing the style of the captured dance, we correlated both captured and synthesized trajectories of samba dancing sequences in relation to the level of compression of the used model, and report on a subjective evaluation over a set of six tests. The achieved results validated our approach, suggesting that a periodic dancing style, and its musical synchrony, can be feasibly reproduced from a suitably parametrized discrete spatiotemporal representation of the gestural motion trajectories, with a notable degree of compression

A Convolutional Approach to Melody Line Identification in Symbolic Scores

In many musical traditions, the melody line is of primary significance in a piece. Human listeners can readily distinguish melodies from accompaniment; however, making this distinction given only the written score -- i.e. without listening to the music performed -- can be a difficult task. Solving this task is of great importance for both Music Information Retrieval and musicological applications. In this paper, we propose an automated approach to identifying the most salient melody line in a symbolic score. The backbone of the method consists of a convolutional neural network (CNN) estimating the probability that each note in the score (more precisely: each pixel in a piano roll encoding of the score) belongs to the melody line. We train and evaluate the method on various datasets, using manual annotations where available and solo instrument parts where not. We also propose a method to inspect the CNN and to analyze the influence exerted by notes on the prediction of other notes; this method can be applied whenever the output of a neural network has the same size as the input