Semiotic Description of Music Structure: an Introduction to the Quaero/Metiss Structural Annotations

12 pagesInternational audienceInterest has been steadily growing in semantic audio and music information retrieval for the description of music structure, i.e., the global organization of music pieces in terms of large-scale structural units. This article presents a detailed methodology for the semiotic description of music structure, based on concepts and criteria which are formulated as generically as possible. We sum up the essential principles and practices developed during an annotation effort deployed by our research group (Metiss) on audio data in the context of the Quaero project, which has led to the public release of over 380 annotations of pop songs from three different data sets. The paper also includes a few case studies and a concise statistical overview of the annotated data

Methodological and musicological investigation of the System & Contrast model for musical form description

The semiotic description of music structure aims at representing the high-level organization of music pieces in a concise, generic and reproducible way as a low-rate stream of arbitrary symbols from a limited alphabet, which results into a sequence of " semiotic units ". In this context, the purpose of the System & Contrast model is to address the internal organization of the semiotic units. In this report, the System & Contrast model is approached from different angles in relation to varied disciplines : cognitive psychology, music analysis and information theory. After establishing a number of links between the System & Contrast model and other approaches of music structure, the model is illustrated on studio-based popular music pieces, as well as on music from the classical Viennese period

Perceptive study and recommendation for sonification categories

Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD), Boston, MA, July 7-9, 2003.In the field of audio signaletics, most sound designers have their own recipes to make samples that convey a certain meaning, which we could call auditory function. The aim of the present article is to compare the perceptive representation and the functional representation with the usual sound categories designed to fulfill specific actions of user's interface. The article finally proposes recommendations for the designers according to perceptive results

Machine learning research that matters for music creation : a case study

Research applying machine learning to music modeling and generation typically proposes model architectures, training methods and datasets, and gauges system performance using quantitative measures like sequence likelihoods and/or qualitative listening tests. Rarely does such work explicitly question and analyse its usefulness for and impact on real-world practitioners, and then build on those outcomes to inform the development and application of machine learning. This article attempts to do these things for machine learning applied to music creation. Together with practitioners, we develop and use several applications of machine learning for music creation, and present a public concert of the results. We reflect on the entire experience to arrive at several ways of advancing these and similar applications of machine learning to music creation.QC 20180827</p

Is Music Structure Annotation Multi-Dimensional? A Proposal for Robust Local Music Annotation.

Abstract. Considering that M.I.R. content-extraction algorithms are evaluated over annotated test-sets, it is worth discussing the robustness of the concepts used for these annotations. In this paper we discuss the robustness of local music annotations, more specifically “Music Structure” annotation. We define four conditions to be fulfilled by an annotation method to provide robust local annotation. We propose mathematical formulations of two of them. We then measure these criteria on existing “Music Structure ” test-sets and discuss the pro’s and con’s of each test-set. From these, we derive a robust set of concepts which form a “multi-dimensional ” description of the “Music Structure”. We then apply this description to a set of 300 tracks representing various music genres and discuss the results.

Automatic morphological description of sounds

cote interne IRCAM: Peeters08bNone / NoneNational audienceAutomatic morphological description of sound

Sound indexing using morphological description

cote interne IRCAM: Peeters10aNone / NoneNational audienceSound indexing using morphological descriptio

Toward Music Structure Annotation

cote interne IRCAM: Peeters09bNone / NoneNational audienceToward Music Structure Annotatio

Methodology and conventions for the latent semiotic annotation of music structure

This document proposes and describes guidelines for the annotation of music structure into elementary units called semiotic blocks, reflecting high-level and high-scale similarities across the music piece. The annotation process requires both the localization of block boundaries (segmentation) and the determination of block classes (labeling). The proposed methodology is based on concepts and principles inspired and adapted from semiology. It combines elements resulting from the analysis of internal properties forming systems within blocks (morphological analysis), from the characterization of distinctive properties across blocks (paradigmatic analysis) and from the location and context of blocks within the music piece (syntagmatic analysis). The implementation of these principles has resulted in a set of notations which are also developed in the document