The availability of large music collections calls for ways to efficiently access and explore them. We present a new approach which combines descriptors derived from audio analysis with meta-information to create different views of a collection. Such views can have a focus on timbre, rhythm, artist, style or other aspects of music. For each view the pieces of music are organized on a map in such a way that similar pieces are located close to each other. The maps are visualized using an Islands of Music metaphor where islands represent groups of similar pieces. The maps are linked to each other using a new technique to align self-organizing maps. The user is able to browse the collection and explore different aspects by gradually changing focus from one view to another. We demonstrate our approach on a small collection using a meta-information-based view and two views generated from audio analysis, namely, beat periodicity as an aspect of rhythm and spectral information as an aspect of timbre.

This paper addresses the genre classification problem for a specific subset of music, standard and Latin ballroom dance music, using a classification method based only on timing information. We compare two methods of extracting periodicities from audio recordings in order to find the metrical hierarchy and timing patterns by which the style of the music can be recognised: the first method performs onset detection and clustering of inter-onset intervals; the second uses autocorrelation on the amplitude envelopes of band-limited versions of the signal as its method of periodicity detection. The relationships between periodicities are then used to find the metrical hierarchy and to estimate the tempo at the beat and measure levels of the hierarchy. The periodicities are then interpreted as musical note values, and the estimated tempo, meter and the distribution of periodicities are used to predict the style of music using a simple set of rules. The methods are evaluated with a test set of standard and Latin dance music, for which the style and tempo are given on the CD cover, providing a "ground truth" by which the automatic classification can be measured.

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A central problem in music information retrieval is finding suitable representations which enable efficient and accurate computation of musical similarity and identity. Low level audio features are ideal for calculating identity, but are of limited use for similarity measures, as many aspects of music can only be captured by considering high level features. We present a new method of characterising music by typical bar-length rhythmic patterns which are automatically extracted from the audio signal, and demonstrate the usefulness of this representation by its application in a genre classification task. Recent work has shown the importance of tempo and periodicity features for genre recognition, and we extend this research by employing the extracted temporal patterns as features. Standard classification algorithms are utilised to discriminate 8 classes of Standard and Latin ballroom dance music (698 pieces). Although pattern extraction is error-prone, and patterns are not always unique to a genre, classification by rhythmic pattern alone achieves up to 50 % correctness (baseline 16%), and by combining with other features, a classification rate of 96 % is obtained. 1.

This paper presents an automatic description system of drum sounds for real-world musical audio signals. Our system can represent onset times and names of drums by means of drum descriptors defined in the context of MPEG-7. For their automatic description, drum sounds must be identified in such polyphonic signals. The problem is that acoustic features of drum sounds vary with each musical piece and precise templates for them cannot be prepared in advance. To solve this problem, we propose new template-adaptation and template-matching methods. The former method adapts a single seed template prepared for each kind of drums to the corresponding drum sound appearing in an actual musical piece. The latter method then can detect all the onsets of each drum by using the corresponding adapted template. The onsets of bass and snare drums in any piece can thus be identified. Experimental results showed that the accuracy of identifying bass and snare drums in popular music was about 90%. Finally, we define drum descriptors in the MPEG-7 format and demonstrate an example of the automatic drum sound description for a piece of popular music.

In this paper, we describe a system for transcribing polyphonic drum sequences from an acoustic signal to a symbolic representation. Low-level signal analysis is done with an acoustic model consisting of a Gaussian mixture model and a support vector machine. For higher-level modeling, periodic N-grams are proposed to construct a "language model" for music, based on the repetitive nature of musical structure. Also, a technique for estimating relatively long N-grams is introduced. The performance of N-grams in the transcription was evaluated using a database of realistic drum sequences from different genres and yielded a performance increase of 7.6 % compared to a the use of only prior (unigram) probabilities with the acoustic model.

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BeatBoxing is a type of vocal percussion, where musicians use their lips, cheeks, and throat to create different beats. It is commonly used by hiphop and rap artists. In this paper, we explore the use of BeatBoxing as a query mechanism for music information retrieval and more speci£cally the retrieval of drum loops. A classi£cation system that automatically identi£es the individual beat boxing sounds and can map them to corresponding drum sounds has been developed. In addition, the tempo of BeatBoxing is automatically detected and used to dynamically browse a database of music. We also describe some experiments in extracting structural representations of rhythm and their use for style classi£cation of drum loops. 1.

We describe a real-time musical agent that generates an audio drum-track by concatenating audio segments automatically extracted from pre-existing musical files. The drum-track can be controlled in real-time by specifying high-level properties (or constraints) holding on metadata automatically extracted from the audio segments. A constraint-satisfaction mechanism, based on local search, selects audio segments that best match those constraints at any time. We report on several drum track audio descriptors designed for the system. We also describe a basic mecanism for controlling the tradeoff between the agent’s autonomy and reactivity, which we illustrate with experiments made in the context of a virtual duet between the system and a human pianist.

This paper deals with the computational analysis of musical audio from recorded audio waveforms. This general problem includes, as sub-tasks, music transcription, extraction of musical pitch, dynamics, timbre, instrument identity, and source separation. Analysis of real musical signals is a highly ill-posed task which is made complicated by the presence of transient sounds, background interference or the complex structure of musical pitches in the time-frequency domain. This paper focuses on models and algorithms for computer transcription of multiple musical pitches in audio, elaborated from previous work by two of the authors. The audio data are supposedly pre-segmented into fixed pitch regimes such as individual chords. The models presented apply to pitched (tonal) music and are formulated via a Gabor representation of non-stationary signals. A Bayesian probabilistic structure is employed for representation of prior information about the parameters of the notes. This paper introduces a numerical Bayesian inference strategy for estimation of the pitches and other parameters of the waveform. The improved algorithm is much quicker, and makes the approach feasible in realistic sitautions.