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Publications

Partial lists of my my publications can be found in the research information system of HoGent and UGent. A list of my publications is also available on Google Scholar. Below a more complete list can be found.

Dissertation

Engineering systematic musicology: methods and services for computational and empirical music research
Joren Six
(2018) Phd Dissertation
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Journal Articles

Olaf: a lightweight, portable audio search system
Joren Six
(2023) Journal of Open Source Software
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Cholinergic-related pupil activity reflects level of emotionality during motor performance
Vidal, M., Onderdijk, K. E., Aguilera, A. M., Six, J., Maes, P.-J., Fritz, T. H., & Leman, M.
(2023) European Journal of Neuroscience,
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Panako: a scalable audio search system
Joren Six
(2022) Journal of Open Source Software
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Download 'Panako: a scalable audio search system'

Motor sequence learning in a goal-directed stepping task in persons with multiple sclerosis : a pilot study
Veldkamp, R., Moumddjian, L., Dun, K., Six, J., Vanbeylen, A., Kos, D., & Feys, P.
(2022) Annals of the New York Academy of Science
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Download 'Motor sequence learning in a goal-directed stepping task in persons with multiple sclerosis : a pilot study'

Embodied learning in multiple sclerosis using melodic, sound, and visual feedback : a potential rehabilitation approach.
Moumddjian, Lousin, Joren Six, Renee Veldkamp, Jenke Geys, Channa Van Der Linden, Mieke Goetschalckx, Johan Van Nieuwenhoven, Ilse Bosmans, Marc Leman, and Peter Feys
(2022) Annals of the New York Academy of Science
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Music-based biofeedback to reduce tibial shock in over-ground running: a proof-of-concept study
Pieter Van den Berghe, Valerio Lorenzoni, Rud Derie, Joren Six, Joeri Gerlo, Marc Leman & Dirk De Clercq
(2021) Scientific Reports
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Download 'Music-based biofeedback to reduce tibial shock in over-ground running: a proof-of-concept study'

Synchronisation sensorimotrice et comportements non verbaux dans la maladie d’Alzheimer : l’influence du contexte social et musical
Matthieu Ghilain, Lise Hobeika, Loris Schiaratura, Micheline Lesaffre, Joren Six, Frank Desmet, Sylvain Clément and Séverine Samson
(2020) Gériatrie et Psychologie Neuropsychiatrie du Vieillissement.
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Timing Markers of Interaction Quality During Semi-Hocket Singing
Alessandro Dell’Anna, Jeska Buhmann, Joren Six, Pieter-Jan Maes and Marc Leman
(2020) Frontiers in Neuroscience
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Download 'Timing Markers of Interaction Quality During Semi-Hocket Singing'

The influence of performing gesture type on interpersonal musical timing, and the role of visual contact and tempo
Esther Coorevits, Pieter-Jan Maes, Joren Six, Marc Leman
(2020) Acta Psychologica
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Download 'The influence of performing gesture type on interpersonal musical timing, and the role of visual contact and tempo'

Validity and reliability of peak tibial accelerations as real-time measure of impact loading during over-ground rearfoot running at different speeds
Pieter Van den Berghe, Joren Six, Joeri Gerlo, Marc Leman, Dirk De Clercq
(2019) Journal of Biomechanics
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Download 'Validity and reliability of peak tibial accelerations as real-time measure of impact loading during over-ground rearfoot running at different speeds'

A Case for Reproducibility in MIR: Replication of ‘A Highly Robust Audio Fingerprinting System’
Joren Six, Federica Bressan and Marc Leman
(2018) Transactions of the International Society of Music Information Retrieval
Author version | Version of record | BibTeX
Download 'A Case for Reproducibility in MIR: Replication of  ‘A Highly Robust Audio Fingerprinting System’'

Beyond documentation – The digital philology of interaction heritage
Marc Leman, Joren Six
(2018) Journal of New Music Research, Special edition on Digital Philology
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The SoundBike: musical sonification strategies to enhance cyclists’ spontaneous synchronization to external music
Pieter-Jan Maes, Valerio Lorenzoni and Joren Six
(2018) Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces
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Download 'The SoundBike: musical sonification strategies to enhance cyclists’ spontaneous synchronization to external music'

Embodied, Participatory Sense-Making in Digitally-Augmented Music Practices: Theoretical Principles and the Artistic Case “SoundBikes”
Pieter-Jan Maes, Valerio Lorenzoni, Bart Moens, Joren Six, Federica Bressan, Ivan Schepers and Marc Leman
(2018) Critical Arts South-North Cultural and Media Studies
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Download 'Embodied, Participatory Sense-Making in Digitally-Augmented Music Practices: Theoretical Principles and the Artistic Case “SoundBikes”'

Adopting a music-to-heart rate alignment strategy to measure the impact of music and music tempo on human heart rate
Edith Van Dyck, Joren Six , Esin Soyer, Marlies Denys, Ilka Bardijn, and Marc Leman
(2017) Musicae Scientiae
Author version | Version of record | BibTeX
Download 'Adopting a music-to-heart rate alignment strategy to measure the impact of music and music tempo on human heart rate'

Acoustical properties in Inhaling Singing: a case-study
Françoise Vanhecke, Mieke Moerman, Frank Desmet, Joren Six, Kristin Daemers, Godfried-Willem Raes, Marc Leman
(2017) Physics in Medicine
Author version | Version of record | BibTeX
Download 'Acoustical properties in Inhaling Singing: a case-study'

Synchronizing Multimodal Recordings Using Audio-To-Audio Alignment
Joren Six and Marc Leman
(2015) Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces
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Evaluation and Recommendation of Pulse and Tempo Annotation in Ethnic Music
Olmo Cornelis, Joren Six, Andre Holzapfel, and Marc Leman
(2013) Journal of New Music Research
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Download 'Evaluation and Recommendation of Pulse and Tempo Annotation in Ethnic Music'

Tarsos, a modular platform for precise pitch analysis of western and non-western music
Joren Six, Olmo Cornelis and Marc Leman
(2013) Journal of New Music Research. 42(2)
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Download 'Tarsos, a modular platform for precise pitch analysis of western and non-western music'

Book Chapters

Duplicate detection for for digital audio archive management: two case studies
Joren Six, Federica Bressan en Koen Renders
(2023) Advances in Speech and Music Technology
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Articles in peer reviewed conference proceedings

DiscStitch: towards audio-to-audio alignment with robustness to playback speed variabilities
Joren Six
(2022) ISMIR 2022 Late Breaking / Demo abstracts
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Panako 2.0 : updates for an acoustic fingerprinting system
Joren Six
(2022) Late Breaking Demo session of the 22st International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference - ISMIR 2021
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Download 'Panako 2.0 : updates for an acoustic fingerprinting system'

BAF: an audio fingerprinting dataset for broadcast monitoring
Cortès, G., Ciurana, A., Molina, E., Miron, M., Meyers, O., Six, J., & Serra, X.
(2022) ISMIR 2022
Author version | BibTeX
Download 'BAF: an audio fingerprinting dataset for broadcast monitoring'

OLAF: Overly Lightweight Acoustic Fingerprinting
Joren Six
(2020) ISMIR 2020 Late Breaking / Demo abstracts
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Download 'OLAF: Overly Lightweight Acoustic Fingerprinting'

Automatic comparison of global children’s and adult songs
Shoichiro Sato, Joren Six, Peter Pfordresher, Shinya Fujii and Patrick Savage
(2019) Proceedings of the 9th Folk Music Analysis (FMA) conference
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Download 'Automatic comparison of global children’s and adult songs'

Automatic comparison of human music, speech, and bird song suggests uniqueness of human scales
Jiei Kuroyanagi, Shoichiro Sato, Meng-Jou Ho, Gakuto Chiba, Joren Six, Peter Pfordresher, Adam Tierney, Shinya Fujii and Patrick Savage
(2019) Proceedings of the 9th Folk Music Analysis (FMA) conference
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Download 'Automatic comparison of human music, speech, and bird song suggests uniqueness of human scales'

Automatic analysis of global music recordings suggests scale tuning universals
Meng-Jou Ho, Shoichiro Sato, Jiei Kuroyanagi, Joren Six, Steven Brown, Shinya Fujii, Patrick E Savage
(2018) Extended abstracts for the Late-Breaking Demo Session of the 19th International Society for Music Information
Author version | BibTeX
Download 'Automatic analysis of global music recordings suggests scale tuning universals'

Real-time music-based biofeedback to reduce impact loading during over-ground running
Pieter Van den Berghe, Valerio Lorenzoni, Joeri Gerlo, Bastiaan Breine , Rud Derie, Joren Six, Marc Leman and Dirk De Clercq
(2018) Proceedings on the 42nd American of Biomechanics Congress.
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Download 'Real-time music-based biofeedback to reduce impact loading during over-ground running'

Applications of Duplicate Detection in Music Archives: from Metadata Comparison to Storage Optimisation
Joren Six, Federica Bressan and Marc Leman
(2018) Proceedings of the 14th Italian Research Conference on Digital Libraries (IRCDL 2018)
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Download 'Applications of Duplicate Detection in Music Archives: from Metadata Comparison to Storage Optimisation'

Applications of duplicate detection: linking meta-data and merging music archives – The experience of the IPEM historical archive of electronic music
Federica Bressan, Joren Six and Marc Leman
(2017) Proceedings of the 4th International Digital Libraries for Musicology workshop (DLfM 2017)
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Download 'Applications of duplicate detection: linking meta-data and merging music archives – The experience of the IPEM historical archive of electronic music'

A framework to provide fine-grained time-dependent context for active listening experiences
Joren Six and Marc Leman
(2017) Proceedings of AES Conference on Semantic Audio
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Regularity and asynchrony when tapping to tactile, auditory and combined pulses
Joren Six, Laura Arens, Hade Demoor, Thomas Kint and Marc Leman
(2017) Proceedings of the ESCOM conference
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MIRchiving: Challenges and opportunities of connecting MIR research and digital music archives
Reinier de Valk, Anja Volk, Andre Holzapfel, Aggelos Pikrakis, Nadine Kroher, Joren Six
(2017) Proceedings of the 4th International Digital Libraries for Musicology workshop (DLfM 2017)
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Download 'MIRchiving: Challenges and opportunities of connecting MIR research and digital music archives'

The Deep History of Music Project
Armand Leroi, Matthias Mauch, Pat Savage, Emmanouil Benetor, Juan Bello, Maria Panteli, Joren Six, Tillman Weyde
(2015) Proceedings of the 5th Folk Music Analysis (FMA) conference
Author version | BibTeX
Download 'The Deep History of Music Project'

TarsosDSP, a Real-Time Audio Processing Framework in Java
Joren Six, Olmo Cornelis and Marc Leman
(2014) Proceedings of the Audio Engineering Society Conference: 53rd International Conference: Semantic Audio
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Download 'TarsosDSP, a Real-Time Audio Processing Framework in Java'

Panako – A Scalable Acoustic Fingerprinting System Handling Time-Scale and Pitch Modification
Joren Six and Marc Leman
(2014) Proceedings of the 15th ISMIR Conference (ISMIR 2014)
Author version | Version of record | BibTeX
Download 'Panako – A Scalable Acoustic Fingerprinting System Handling Time-Scale and Pitch Modification'

Peachnote Piano: Making MIDI instruments social and smart using Arduino, Android and Nodejs
Joren Six, Vladimir Viro
(2011) Demo Sessions of the 12th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2011)
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Download 'Peachnote Piano: Making MIDI instruments social and smart using Arduino, Android and Nodejs'

Tarsos – a Platform to Explore Pitch Scales in Non-Western and Western Music
Joren Six and Olmo Cornelis
(2011) Proceedings of the 12th International Symposium on Music Information Retrieval
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Download 'Tarsos – a Platform to Explore Pitch Scales in Non-Western and Western Music'

Master's Thesis

Presentations, Discussions Guest Lectures, by Invitation

Panel discussion, 2012: Technological challenges for the computational modelling of the world’s musical heritage, Folk Music Analysis Conference 2012 – FMA 2012, organizers: Polina Proutskova and Emilia Gomez, Seville, Spain

Guest lecture, 2012: Non-western music and digital humanities, for: “Studies in Western Music History: Quantitative and Computational Approaches to Music History”, M.I.T., Boston, U.S.

Guest lecture, 2011: Presenting Tarsos, a software platform for pitch analysis. At: Electrical and Electronics Eng.Dept. IYTE, Izmir, Turkey

Workshop 2017:Computational Ethnomusicology – Methodologies for a new field Leiden, The Netherlands

Experience as Lecturer

A002301 (2016-2017) “Grondslagen van de muzikale acoustica en sonologie” – Theory and Practice sessions together with dr. Pieter-Jan Maes

Other Output

I am recognized as co-inventor on a Patent titled Low impact running WO/2020/002275

For research software see the software output page




~ Olaf: a lightweight, portable audio search system

Fig: Some AI imagining audio search.

Recently I have published a paper titled ‘Olaf: a lightweight, portable audio search system’ in the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS). The journal is a ‘hack’ to circumvent the focus on citable papers in the academic world: getting recognition for publishing software as a researcher is not straightforward.

Both Ghent University’s research output tracking system and Flanders FWO academic profile do not allow to enter software as research output. The focus is still solely on papers, even when custom developed research software has become a fundamental aspect in many research areas. My role is somewhere between that of a ‘pure’ researcher and that of a research software engineer which makes this focus on papers quite relevant to me.

The paper aims to make the recent development on Olaf ‘count’. Thanks to the JOSS review process the Olaf software was improved considerably: CI, unit tests, documentation, containerization,… The paper was a good reason to improve on all these areas which are all too easy to neglect. The paper itself is a short, rather general overview of Olaf:

Olaf stands for Overly Lightweight Acoustic Fingerprinting and solves the problem of finding short audio fragments in large digital audio archives. The content-based audio search algorithm implemented in Olaf can identify a short audio query in a large database of thousands of hours of audio using an acoustic fingerprinting technique.


~ Attempting humor in academic writing

Screenshot of a browser based pitch organization extraction tool
Fig: Advances in Speech and Music Technology book cover.

I have recently published an chapter in an academic book published by Springer. The topic of the book is of interest to me but can be perceived as rather dry: Advances in Speech and Music Technology.

The chapter I co-authored presented two case studies on detecting duplicates in music archives. The fist case study deals with segmentation reuse in an archive of early electronic music. The second with meta-data reuse in an archive of a public broadcaster containing digitized commercial shellac disc recordings with many duplicates.

Duplicate detection being the main topic, I decided to title the article Duplicate Detection for for Digital Audio Archive Management. It is easy to miss, and not much is lost if you do, but there is a duplicate ‘for’ in the title. If you did detect the duplicate you have detected the duplicate in the duplicate detection article. Since I have fathered two kids I see it as an hard earned right to make dad-jokes like that. Even in academic writing.

It was surprisingly difficult to get the title published as-is. At every step of the academic publishing process (review, editorial, typesetting, lay-outing) I was asked about it and had to send an email like the one below. Every email and every explanation made my second-guess my sense of humor but I do stand by it.

From: Joren
To: Editors ASMT

Dear Editors,

I have updated my submission on easychair in…

I would like to keep the title however as is an attempt at word-play. These things tend to have less impact when explained but the article is about duplicate detection and is titled ‘Duplicate detection for for digital audio archive management’. The reviewer, attentively, detected the duplicate ‘for’ but unfortunately failed to see my attempt at humor. To me, it is a rather harmless witticism.

Regards

Joren

Anyway, I do think that humor can serve as a gateway to direct attention to rather dry, academic material. Also the message and the form of the message should not be confused. John Oliver, for example, made his whole career on delivering serious sometimes dry messages with heaps of humor: which does not make the topics less serious. I think there are a couple of things to be learned there. Anyway, now that I have your attention, please do read the author version of Duplicate Detection for for Digital Audio Archive Management: Two Case Studies.


~ Panako: a scalable audio search system

Fig: DALL.E 2 imagining a fight between papers and software.

Recently I have published a paper titled ‘Panako: a scalable audio search system’ in the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS). The journal is a ‘hack’ to circumvent the focus on citable papers in the academic world: getting recognition for publishing software as a researcher is not straightforward.

The research output tracking system of Ghent University (biblio) and Flanders FWO’s academic profile are not built to track software as research output. The focus is still solely on papers, even when custom developed research software has become a fundamental aspect in many research areas. My role is somewhere between that of a ‘pure’ researcher and that of a research software engineer which makes this focus on papers quite relevant to me.

The paper aims to make the recent development on Panako ‘count’. Thanks to the JOSS review process the Panako software was improved considerably: CI, unit tests, documentation, containerization,… The paper was a good reason to improve on all these areas which are all too easy to neglect. The paper itself is a short, rather general overview of Panako:

Panako solves the problem of finding short audio fragments in large digital audio archives. The content based audio search algorithm implemented in Panako is able to identify a short audio query in a large database of thousands of hours of audio using an acoustic fingerprinting technique.


~ Low impact runner: a music based bio-feedback system

Fig: schema of the low impact runner system.

I have been lucky to have been involved in an interdisciplinary research project around the low impact runner: a music based bio-feedback system to reduce tibial shock in over-ground running. In the beginning of October 2022 the PhD defence of Rud Derie takes place so it is a good moment to look back to this collaboration between several branches of Ghent University: IPEM , movement and sports science and IDLab.

The idea behind the project was to first select runners with a high foot-fall impact. Then an intervention would slightly nudge these runner to a running style with lower impact. A lower repetitive impact is expected to reduce the chance on injuries common for runners. A system was invented in which musical bio-feedback was given on the measured impact. The schema to the right shows the concept.

I was involved in development of the first hardware prototypes which measured acceleration on the legs of the runner and the development of software to receive and handle these measurement on a tablet strapped to a backpack the runner was wearing. This software also logged measurements, had real-time visualisation capabilities and allowed remote control and monitoring over the network. Finally measurements were send to a Max/MSP sonification engine. These prototypes of software and hardware were replaced during a valorization project but some parts of the software ended up in the final Android application.

Video: the left screen shows the indoor positioning system via UWB (ultra-wide-band) and the right screen shows the music feedback system and the real time monitoring of impact of the runner. Video by Pieter Van den Berghe

Over time the first wired sensors were replaced with wireless Bluetooth versions. This made the sensors easy to use and also to visualize sensor values in the browser thanks to the Web Bluetooth API. I have experimented with this and made two demos: a low impact runner visualizer and one with the conceptual schema.

Vid: Visualizing the Bluetooth Low Impact Runner sensor in the browser.

The following three studies shows a part of the trajectory of the project. The first paper is a validation of the measurement system. Secondly a proof-of-concept study is done which finally greenlights a larger scale intervention study.

  1. Van den Berghe, P., Six, J., Gerlo, J., Leman, M., & De Clercq, D. (2019). Validity and reliability of peak tibial accelerations as real-time measure of impact loading during over-ground rearfoot running at different speeds. Journal of Biomechanics, 86, 238-242.
  2. Van den Berghe, P., Lorenzoni, V., Derie, R., Six, J., Gerlo, J., Leman, M., & De Clercq, D. (2021). Music-based biofeedback to reduce tibial shock in over-ground running: A proof-of-concept study. Scientific reports, 11(1), 1-12.
  3. Van den Berghe, P., Derie, R., Bauwens, P., Gerlo, J., Segers, V., Leman, M., & De Clercq, D. (2022). Reducing the peak tibial acceleration of running by music‐based biofeedback: A quasi‐randomized controlled trial. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports

There are quite a number of other papers but I was less involved in those. The project also resulted in two PhD’s:

I am also recognized as co-inventor on the low impact runner system patent and there are concrete plans for a commercial spin-off. To be continued…



~ ISMIR 2020 - Virtual Conference

ISMIR 2020 Logo

From 11-16 October 2020 the latest instalment of the ISMIR conference series was held. Due to the pandemic, the 21st ISMIR conference was the first virtual one. As usual, participants and presenters from around the world joined the conference. For the first time, however, not all participants synchronised their circadian rhythm. By repeating most events with 12h in between, the organisers managed to put together a schedule befitting nearly all participants.

The virtual format had some clear advantages: travel was not needed, so (environmental) cost was low. Attendance fees were lower than usual since no spaces or catering was needed. This democratised the conference experience and attendance reached a record high.

The scientific program of the conference was impressive and varied. It is At the conferences Late Breaking/Demo session I presented Olaf: Overly Lightweight Acoustic Fingerprinting.


~ LW Research Day 2019 on Digital Humanities

On the 9th of September 2019 the second research day organized by the faculty of Arts and Philosophy of Ghent University took place. The theme of the day was ‘Digital Humanities’ and the program gave an overview of the breadth of research at our faculty with topics as logic, history, archeology, chemistry, geography

Together with Jeska, I presented an ongoing study on musical interaction. In the study one of the measurements was the body movement of two participants. This is done with boards that are equipped with weight sensors. The data that comes out of this can be inspected for synchronisation, quality and quantity of movement, movement periodicities.


The hardware is the work of Ivan Schepers, the software used to capture and transmit messages is called “the MIDImorphosis” and developed by me. The research is in collaboration with Jeska Buhman, Marc Leman and Alessandro Dell’Anna. An article with detailed findings is forthcoming.


~ AAWM/FMA 2019 - Birmingham

I am currently in Birmingham, UK at the 2019 at the joint Analytical Approaches to World Music (AAWM) and Folk Music Conference. The opening concert by the RBC folk ensemble already provided the most lively and enthusiastic conference opening probably ever. Especially considering the early morning hour (9.30). At the conference, two studies will be presented on which I collaborated:

Automatic comparison of human music, speech, and bird song suggests uniqueness of human scales

Automatic comparison of human music, speech, and bird song suggests uniqueness of human scales by Jiei Kuroyanagi, Shoichiro Sato, Meng-Jou Ho, Gakuto Chiba, Joren Six, Peter Pfordresher, Adam Tierney, Shinya Fujii and Patrick Savage

The uniqueness of human music relative to speech and animal song has been extensively debated, but rarely directly measured. We applied an automated scale analysis algorithm to a sample of 86 recordings of human music, human speech, and bird songs from around the world. We found that human music throughout the world uniquely emphasized scales with small-integer frequency ratios, particularly a perfect 5th (3:2 ratio), while human speech and bird song showed no clear evidence of consistent scale-like tunings. We speculate that the uniquely human tendency toward scales with small-integer ratios may relate to the evolution of synchronized group performance among humans.

Automatic comparison of global children’s and adult songs

Automatic comparison of global children’s and adult songs by Shoichiro Sato, Joren Six, Peter Pfordresher, Shinya Fujii and Patrick Savage

Music throughout the world varies greatly, yet some musical features like scale structure display striking crosscultural similarities. Are there musical laws or biological constraints that underlie this diversity? The “vocal mistuning” hypothesis proposes that cross-cultural regularities in musical scales arise from imprecision in vocal tuning, while the integer-ratio hypothesis proposes that they arise from perceptual principles based on psychoacoustic consonance. In order to test these hypotheses, we conducted automatic comparative analysis of 100 children’s and adult songs from throughout the world. We found that children’s songs tend to have narrower melodic range, fewer scale degrees, and less precise intonation than adult songs, consistent with motor limitations due to their earlier developmental stage. On the other hand, adult and children’s songs share some common tuning intervals at small-integer ratios, particularly the perfect 5th (~3:2 ratio). These results suggest that some widespread aspects of musical scales may be caused by motor constraints, but also suggest that perceptual preferences for simple integer ratios might contribute to cross-cultural regularities in scale structure. We propose a “sensorimotor hypothesis” to unify these competing theories.


~ Validity and reliability of peak tibial accelerations as real-time measure of impact loading during over-ground rearfoot running at different speeds - Journal of Biomechanics

With the goal in mind to reduce common runner injuries we first need to measure some running style characteristics. Therefore, we have developed a sensor to measure how hard a runners foot repeatedly hits the ground. This sensor has been compared with laboratory equipment which proofs that its measurements are valid and can be repeated. The main advantages of our sensor is that it can be used ‘in the wild’, outside the lab on the runners regular tours. We want to use this sensor to provide real-time biofeedback in order to change running style and ultimately reduce injury risk.

We have published an article on this sensor in the journal of Biomechanics:
Pieter Van den Berghe, Joren Six, Joeri Gerlo, Marc Leman, Dirk De Clercq,
Validity and reliability of peak tibial accelerations as real-time measure of impact loading during over-ground rearfoot running at different speeds, (author version)
Journal of Biomechanics,
2019

Studies seeking to determine the effects of gait retraining through biofeedback on peak tibial acceleration (PTA) assume that this biometric trait is a valid measure of impact loading that is reliable both within and between sessions. However, reliability and validity data were lacking for axial and resultant PTAs along the speed range of over-ground endurance running. A wearable system was developed to continuously measure 3D tibial accelerations and to detect PTAs in real-time. Thirteen rearfoot runners ran at 2.55, 3.20 and 5.10 m*s-1 over an instrumented runway in two sessions with re-attachment of the system. Intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) were used to determine within-session reliability. Repeatability was evaluated by paired T-tests and ICCs. Concerning validity, axial and resultant PTAs were correlated to the peak vertical impact loading rate (LR) of the ground reaction force. Additionally, speed should affect impact loading magnitude. Hence, magnitudes were compared across speeds by RM-ANOVA. Within a session, ICCs were over 0.90 and reasonable for clinical measurements. Between sessions, the magnitudes remained statistically similar with ICCs ranging from 0.50 to 0.59 for axial PTA and from 0.53 to 0.81 for resultant PTA. Peak accelerations of the lower leg segment correlated to LR with larger coefficients for axial PTA (r range: 0.64–0.84) than for the resultant PTA per speed condition. The magnitude of each impact measure increased with speed. These data suggest that PTAs registered per stand-alone system can be useful during level, over-ground rearfoot running to evaluate impact loading in the time domain when force platforms are unavailable in studies with repeated measurements.


~ ISMIR 2018 Conference - Automatic Analysis Of Global Music Recordings suggests Scale Tuning Universals

Thanks to the support of a travel grant by the faculty of Arts and Philosophy of Ghent University I was able to attend the ISMIR 2018 conference. A conference on Music Information Retrieval. I am co author on a contribution for the the Late-Breaking / Demos session

The structure of musical scales has been proposed to reflect universal acoustic principles based on simple integer ratios. However, some studying tuning in small samples of non-Western cultures have argued that such ratios are not universal but specific to Western music. To address this debate, we applied an algorithm that could automatically analyze and cross-culturally compare scale tunings to a global sample of 50 music recordings, including both instrumental and vocal pieces. Although we found great cross-cultural diversity in most scale degrees, these preliminary results also suggest a strong tendency to include the simplest possible integer ratio within the octave (perfect fifth, 3:2 ratio, ~700 cents) in both Western and non-Western cultures. This suggests that cultural diversity in musical scales is not without limit, but is constrained by universal psycho-acoustic principles that may shed light on the evolution of human music.


~ TISMIR journal article - A Case for Reproducibility in MIR: Replication of ‘A Highly Robust Audio Fingerprinting System’

As an extension of the ISMIR conferences the International Society for Music Information Retrievel started a new journal: TISMIR. The first issue contains an article of mine:
A Case for Reproducibility in MIR: Replication of ‘A Highly Robust Audio Fingerprinting System’. The abstract can be read here:

Claims made in many Music Information Retrieval (MIR) publications are hard to verify due to the fact that (i) often only a textual description is made available and code remains unpublished – leaving many implementation issues uncovered; (ii) copyrights on music limit the sharing of datasets; and (iii) incentives to put effort into reproducible research – publishing and documenting code and specifics on data – is lacking. In this article the problems around reproducibility are illustrated by replicating an MIR work. The system and evaluation described in ‘A Highly Robust Audio Fingerprinting System’ is replicated as closely as possible. The replication is done with several goals in mind: to describe difficulties in replicating the work and subsequently reflect on guidelines around reproducible research. Added contributions are the verification of the reported work, a publicly available implementation and an evaluation method that is reproducible.


~ JNMR article - Beyond documentation – The digital philology of interaction heritage

Marc Leman and myself have recently published an article in the Journal of New Music Research for a special issue on Digital Philology for Multimedia Cultural Heritage. Our contribution is titled Beyond documentation – The digital philology of interaction heritage

A philologist’s approach to heritage is traditionally based on the curation of documents, such as text, audio and video. However, with the advent of interactive multimedia, heritage becomes floating and volatile, and not easily captured in documents. We propose an approach to heritage that goes beyond documents. We consider the crucial role of institutes for interactive multimedia (as motor of a living culture of interaction) and propose that the digital philologist’s task will be to promote the collective/shared responsibility of (interactive) documenting, engage engineering in developing interactive approaches to heritage, and keep interaction-heritage alive through the education of citizens.


Previous blog posts

26-04-2018 ~ MIR Meetup Berlin - Acoustic Fingerprinting in Research

02-02-2018 ~ Engineering systematic musicology

23-01-2018 ~ IRCDL 2018 - Applications of Duplicate Detection in Music Archives: from Metadata Comparison to Storage Optimisation

24-11-2017 ~ International Symposium on Computational Ethnomusicological Archiving

28-10-2017 ~ 4th International Digital Libraries for Musicology workshop (DLfM 2017)

31-07-2017 ~ ESCOM 2017 - Regularity and asynchrony when tapping to tactile, auditory and combined pulses

24-06-2016 ~ Real-time signal synchronization with acoustic fingerprinting - A Master's Thesis By Ward Van Assche

19-03-2016 ~ Connecting Musical Modules - Musical Hardware and Software Interfaces

30-10-2015 ~ Lecture on MIR - Tone Scale Extraction - Acoustic Fingerprinting

06-08-2015 ~ Synchronizing Multimodal Recordings Using Audio-To-Audio Alignment - In Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces

25-11-2014 ~ Audio Fingerprinting - Opportunities for digital musicology