Real-time audio interaction in serious games for music learning

In this LBD, we present several Apps for playing while learning music or for learning music while playing. The core of all the games is based on the good performance of the real-time audio interaction algorithms developed by the ATIC group at Universidad de Ma ́laga (SPAIN).Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech. This work has been funded by the Ministerio de Econom ıa y Competitividad of the Spanish Government under Project No. TIN2013-47276-C6-2-R and by the Junta de Andalucía under Project No. P11-TIC-7154

Modeling spectral changes in singing voice for pitch modification

We present an advanced method to achieve natural modifications when applying a pitch shifting process to singing voice by modifying the spectral envelope of the audio ex- cerpt. To this end, an all-pole spectral envelope model has been selected to describe the global variations of the spectral envelope with the changes of the pitch. We performed a pitch shifting process of some sustained vowels with the envelope processing and without it, and compared both by means of a survey open to volunteers in our website.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech. This work has been funded by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad of the Spanish Government under Project No. TIN2013-47276-C6-2-R and by the Junta de Andalucía under Project No. P11-TIC-7154

Android app for automatic music composition

In this contribution, we present an Android App that generates music automatically replicating a specific contemporary genre, specifically rock music. The composition system is based on the analysis of a set of songs of the desired genre. The analysis results the automatic composition algorithm requires are exported to a JSON file that can be readily imported and parsed. The Android App developed creates a symbolic representation of the music generated for drums, bass and rhythm guitar that can be exported to a MIDI file or audio waveform. The evaluation results show that the automatic compositions generated are not distinguished amongst other excerpts created by human composers.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech. Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Gobierno de España, Proyecto TIN2016-75866-C3-2-R

Conducting a virtual ensemble with a kinect device

This paper presents a gesture-based interaction technique for the implementation of an orchestra conductor and a virtual ensemble, using a 3D camera-based sensor to capture user’s gestures. In particular, a human-computer interface has been developed to recognize conducting gestures using a Microsoft Kinect device. The system allows the conductor to control both the tempo in the piece played as well as the dynamics of each instrument set independently. In order to modify the tempo in the playback, a time-frequency processing-based algorithmis used. Finally, an experiment was conducted to assess user’s opinion of the system as well as experimentally confirm if the features in the system were effectively improving user experience or not.This work has been funded by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad of the Spanish Government under Project No. TIN2010-21089-C03-02 and Project No. IPT-2011-0885-430000 and by the Junta de Andalucia under Project No. P11-TIC-7154. The work has been done at Universidad de Malaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucia Tech

Music Learning Tools for Android Devices

In this paper, a musical learning application for mobile devices is presented. The main objective is to design and develop an application capable of offering exercises to practice and improve a selection of music skills, to users interested in music learning and training. The selected music skills are rhythm, melodic dictation and singing. The application includes an audio signal analysis system implemented making use of the Goertzel algorithm which is employed in singing exercises to check if the user sings the right musical note. This application also includes a graphical interface to represent musical symbols. A set of tests were conducted to check the usefulness of the application as musical learning tool. A group of users with different music knowledge have tested the system and reported to have found it effective, easy and accessible.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Low-cost step aerobics system with virtual aerobics trainer

In this paper a low-cost step-aerobics instructor simulation system is presented. The proposed system analyses a given song to iden- tify its rhythmic pattern. Subsequently, this rhythmic pattern is used in order to issue a set of steps-aerobics commands to the user, thus simu- lating a training session. The system uses a Wii Balance Board to track exercises performed by users and runs on an Android smartphone. A set of tests were conducted to assess user experience and opinion on the system developed.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Parametric model of spectral envelope to synthesize realistic intensity variations in singing voice

2014 IEEE International Conference on Acoustic, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), pp. 634 - 638In this paper, we propose a method to synthesize the natural variations of spectral envelope as intensity varies in singing voice. To this end, we propose a parametric model of spectral envelope based on novel 4-pole resonators as formant filters. This model has been used to analyse 60 vowels sung at different intensities in order to define a set of functions describing the global variations of parameters along intensity. These functions have been used to modify the intensity of 16 recorded vowels and 8 synthetic vowels generated with Vocaloid. The realism of the transformations performed with our approach has been evaluated by four amateurmusicians in comparison to Melodyne for real sounds and to Vocaloid for synthetic sounds. The proposed approach has been proved to achieve more realistic sounds than Melodyne and Vocaloid, especially for loud-to-weak transformations.This work has been funded by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad of the Spanish Government under Project No. TIN2010-21089-C03- 02 and Project No. IPT-2011-0885-430000, by the Junta de Andaluc´ıa under Project No. P11-TIC-7154 and by the Ministerio de Educaci ón, Cultura y Deporte through the ‘Programa Nacional de Movilidad de Recursos Humanos del Plan Nacional de I-D+i 2008-2011, prorrogado por Acuerdo de Consejo de Ministros de 7 de octubre de 2011’. The work has been done in the context of Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech, Universidad de Málaga

The importance of F0 tracking in query-by-singing-humming

In this paper, we present a comparative study of several state-of-the-art F0 trackers applied to the context of query-by-singing-humming (QBSH). This study has been carried out using the well known, freely available, MIR-QBSH dataset in different conditions of added pub-style noise and smartphone-style distortion. For audio-to-MIDI melodic matching, we have used two state-of-the-art systems and a simple, easily reproducible baseline method. For the evaluation, we measured the QBSH performance for 189 different combinations of F0 tracker, noise/distortion conditions and matcher. Additionally, the overall accuracy of the F0 transcriptions (as defined in MIREX) was also measured. In the results, we found that F0 tracking overall accuracy correlates with QBSH performance, but it does not totally measure the suitability of a pitch vector for QBSH. In addition, we also found clear differences in robustness to F0 transcription errors between different matchers.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech. This work has been funded by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad of the Spanish Government under Project No. TIN2013-47276-C6-2-R and by the Junta de Andalucía under Project No. P11-TIC-7154

Automatic Melody Composition Inspired by Short Melodies Using a Probabilistic Model and Harmonic Rules

This demo shows how automatic melody composition of melodies that follow the style of a certain singleshort melodic excerpt can be achieved in such a way that the sample excerpt can be considered an inspirationalpiece of music for the automatic compositor.Music composition has been faced from diverse perspectives and using different approaches, among them theutilization of probabilistic schemes is common since early stages. For example, Brooks et al. [1] considerthe direct utilization of m-order Markov chains for music analysis and generation, and other authors havefollowed a relatively similar path [2]. Often large data sets are necessary to train music generation systems,though in some rare cases algorithms are developed to perform automatic melody composition based on asingle sample melody [5]; in such case, the application of explicit rules is of great importance.Considering the probabilistic approach to music models and music rules on the basis of the melody generationmodel developed in [4], a melody generation scheme is designed that is capable of generating music excerptswith the style and resemblance of short individual MIDI melody samples.Since only one sample melody of arbitrarily small duration will be considered, some modification must bedone to the system described in [4]. Specifically, modifications are necessary in the extraction of musicalparameters and in the generation scheme in order to provide with the necessary musical variability for theadaptation of extracted musical parameters and patterns. .Universidad de Málaga, Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech.This work was funded by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad of the Spanish Government under Project No. TIN2016-75866-C3-2-R

Android App for Recreating old Recording Sound Effects for Voice

An Android App for recreating old-recording sound effects for voice is presented. The old-recording sound effects recreated are: Vinyl effect, Cylinder effect and Tape effect. Also, two nonlinear audio effects: Tube effect and Overdrive effect, are implemented since analog recording and reproduction are based on nonlinear signal processing.This work has been funded by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad of the Spanish Government under Project No. TIN2016-75866-C3-2-R. This work has been done at Universidad de Málaga, Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech