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

Automatic morphological description of sounds

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

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.

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

SEMIOTIC STRUCTURE LABELING OF MUSIC PIECES: CONCEPTS, METHODS AND ANNOTATION CONVENTIONS

Music structure description, i.e. the task of representing the high-level organization of music pieces in a concise, generic and reproducible way, is currently a scientific challenge both algorithmically and conceptually. In this paper, we focus on semiotic structure, i.e. the description of similarities and internal relationships within a music piece, as a low-rate stream of arbitrary symbols from a limited alphabet and we address methodological questions related to annotation. We formulate the labeling task as a blind demodulation problem, whose goal is to identify a minimal set of semiotic codewords, whose realizations within the music piece are subject to a number of connotative variations viewed as modulations. The determination of labels is achieved by combining morphological, paradigmatic and syntagmatic considerations relying respectively on (i) a morphological model of semiotic blocks in order to define their individual properties, (ii) the support of prototypical structural patterns to guide the comparison between blocks and (iii) a methodology for the determination of distinctive features across semiotic classes. Specific notations are introduced to account for unresolvable semiotic ambiguities, which are occasional but must be considered as inherent to the music matter itself. A set of 500 music pieces labeled in accordance with the proposed concepts and annotation conventions is being released with this article. 1