~ ISMIR 2014 - Panako - A Scalable Acoustic Fingerprinting System Handling Time-Scale and Pitch Modification

At ISMIR 2014 i will present a paper on a fingerprinting system. ISMIR is the annual conference of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval is the world’s leading interdisciplinary forum on accessing, analyzing, and organizing digital music of all sorts. This years instalment takes place in Taipei, Taiwan. My contribution is a paper titled Panako – A Scalable Acoustic Fingerprinting System Handling Time-Scale and Pitch Modification, it will be presented during a poster session the 27th of October.

This paper presents a scalable granular acoustic fingerprinting system. An acoustic fingerprinting system uses condensed representation of audio signals, acoustic fingerprints, to identify short audio fragments in large audio databases. A robust fingerprinting system generates similar fingerprints for perceptually similar audio signals. The system presented here is designed to handle time-scale and pitch modifications. The open source implementation of the system is called Panako and is evaluated on commodity hardware using a freely available reference database with fingerprints of over 30,000 songs. The results show that the system responds quickly and reliably on queries, while handling time-scale and pitch modifications of up to ten percent.

The system is also shown to handle GSM-compression, several audio effects and band-pass filtering. After a query, the system returns the start time in the reference audio and how much the query has been pitch-shifted or time-stretched with respect to the reference audio. The design of the system that offers this combination of features is the main contribution of this paper.

The system is available, together with documentation and information on how to reproduce the results from the ISMIR paper, on the Panako website. Also available for download is the Panako poster, Panako ISMIR paper and the Panako poster.

ISMIR, Presentation, Music Information Retrieval, Research papers, UGent, and Computational musicology

panako_poster.pdf, panako_poster.png, ismir_2014_panako_fingerprinter.pdf, and panako_poster_portrait.svg

~ TarsosDSP Paper and Presentation at AES 53rd International conference on Semantic Audio

TarsosDSP will be presented at the AES 53rd International conference on Semantic Audio in London . During the conference both a presentation and demonstration of the paper TarsosDSP, a Real-Time Audio Processing Framework in Java, by Joren Six, Olmo Cornelis and Marc Leman, in Proceedings of the 53rd AES Conference (AES 53rd), 2014. From their website:

Semantic Audio is concerned with content-based management of digital audio recordings. The rapid evolution of digital audio technologies, e.g. audio data compression and streaming, the availability of large audio libraries online and offline, and recent developments in content-based audio retrieval have significantly changed the way digital audio is created, processed, and consumed. New audio content can be produced at lower cost, while also large audio archives at libraries or record labels are opening to the public. Thus the sheer amount of available audio data grows more and more each day. Semantic analysis of audio resulting in high-level metadata descriptors such as musical chords and tempo, or the identification of speakers facilitate content-based management of audio recordings. Aside from audio retrieval and recommendation technologies, the semantics of audio signals are also becoming increasingly important, for instance, in object-based audio coding, as well as intelligent audio editing, and processing. Recent product releases already demonstrate this to a great extent, however, more innovative functionalities relying on semantic audio analysis and management are imminent. These functionalities may utilise, for instance, (informed) audio source separation, speaker segmentation and identification, structural music segmentation, or social and Semantic Web technologies, including ontologies and linked open data.

This conference will give a broad overview of the state of the art and address many of the new scientific disciplines involved in this still-emerging field. Our purpose is to continue fostering this line of interdisciplinary research. This is reflected by the wide variety of invited speakers presenting at the conference.

The paper presents TarsosDSP, a framework for real-time audio analysis and processing. Most libraries and frameworks offer either audio analysis and feature extraction or audio synthesis and processing. TarsosDSP is one of a only a few frameworks that offers both analysis, processing and feature extraction in real-time, a unique feature in the Java ecosystem. The framework contains practical audio processing algorithms, it can be extended easily, and has no external dependencies. Each algorithm is implemented as simple as possible thanks to a straightforward processing pipeline. TarsosDSP’s features include a resampling algorithm, onset detectors, a number of pitch estimation algorithms, a time stretch algorithm, a pitch shifting algorithm, and an algorithm to calculate the Constant-Q. The framework also allows simple audio synthesis, some audio effects, and several filters. The Open Source framework is a valuable contribution to the MIR-Community and ideal fit for interactive MIR-applications on Android. The full paper can be downloaded TarsosDSP, a Real-Time Audio Processing Framework in Java

A BibTeX entry for the paper can be found below.

  







  
@inproceedings{six2014tarsosdsp,
  author      = {Joren Six and Olmo Cornelis and Marc Leman},
  title       = {{TarsosDSP, a Real-Time Audio Processing Framework in Java}},
  booktitle   = {{Proceedings of the 53rd AES Conference (AES 53rd)}}, 
  year        =  2014
}

UGent, Research papers, Presentation, and TarsosDSP

aes53_tarsos_dsp.pdf

~ Evaluation and Recommendation of Pulse and Tempo Annotation in Ethnic Music - In Journal Of New Music Research

The journal paper Evaluation and Recommendation of Pulse and Tempo Annotation in Ethnic Music – In Journal Of New Music Research by Cornelis, Six, Holzapfel and Leman was published in a special issue about Computational Ethnomusicology of the Journal of New Music Research on the 20th of august 2013. Below you can find the abstract for the article, and the full text author version of the article itself.

Abstract: Large digital archives of ethnic music require automatic tools to provide musical content descriptions. While various automatic approaches are available, they are to a wide extent developed for Western popular music. This paper aims to analyze how automated tempo estimation approaches perform in the context of Central-African music. To this end we collect human beat annotations for a set of musical fragments, and compare them with automatic beat tracking sequences. We first analyze the tempo estimations derived from annotations and beat tracking results. Then we examine an approach, based on mutual agreement between automatic and human annotations, to automate such analysis, which can serve to detect musical fragments with high tempo ambiguity.

To read the full text you can either download Evaluation and Recommendation of Pulse ant Tempo Annotation in Ethnic Music, Author version. Or obtain the published version of Evaluation and Recommendation of Pulse ant Tempo Annotation in Ethnic Music, published version

Below the BibTex entry for the article is embedded.

  











  
@article{cornelis2013tempo_jnmr,
  author = {Olmo Cornelis, Joren Six, Andre Holzapfel, and Marc Leman},
  title = {{Evaluation and Recommendation of Pulse ant Tempo Annotation in Ethnic Music}},
  journal = {{Journal of New Music Research}},
  volume = {42},
  number = {2},
  pages = {131-149},
  year = {2013},
  doi = {10.1080/09298215.2013.812123}
}

HoGent, featured, JNMR, and Research papers

2013.10.09.Tempo_annotation_in_ethnic_music-JNMR-Author_Version.pdf and jnmr.cover.jpg

~ Tarsos, a Modular Platform for Precise Pitch Analysis of Western and Non-Western Music - In Journal Of New Music Research

The journal paper Tarsos, a Modular Platform for Precise Pitch Analysis of Western and Non-Western Music by Six, Cornelis, and Leman was published in a special issue about Computational Ethnomusicology of the Journal of New Music Research on the 20th of august 2013. Below you can find the abstract for the article, and pointers to audio examples, the Tarsos software, and the author version of the article itself.

Abstract: This paper presents Tarsos, a modular software platform used to extract and analyze pitch organization in music. With Tarsos pitch estimations are generated from an audio signal and those estimations are processed in order to form musicologically meaningful representations. Tarsos aims to offer a flexible system for pitch analysis through the combination of an interactive user interface, several pitch estimation algorithms, filtering options, immediate auditory feedback and data output modalities for every step. To study the most frequently used pitches, a fine-grained histogram that allows up to 1200 values per octave is constructed. This allows Tarsos to analyze deviations in Western music, or to analyze specific tone scales that differ from the 12 tone equal temperament, common in many non-Western musics. Tarsos has a graphical user interface or can be launched using an API – as a batch script. Therefore, it is fit for both the analysis of individual songs and the analysis of large music corpora. The interface allows several visual representations, and can indicate the scale of the piece under analysis. The extracted scale can be used immediately to tune a MIDI keyboard that can be played in the discovered scale. These features make Tarsos an interesting tool that can be used for musicological analysis, teaching and even artistic productions.

To read the full text you can either download Tarsos, a Modular Platform for Precise Pitch Analysis of Western and Non-Western Music, Author version. Or obtain the published version of Tarsos, a Modular Platform for Precise Pitch Analysis of Western and Non-Western Music, published version

Ladrang Kandamanyura (slendro pathet manyura), is the name of the piece used in the article throughout section 2. The album on which the piece can be found is available at wergo. Below a thirty second fragment is embedded. You can also download the thirty second fragment to analyse it yourself.

Below the BibTex entry for the article is embedded.

  













  
@article{six2013tarsos_jnmr,
  author = {Six, Joren and Cornelis, Olmo and Leman, Marc},
  title = {Tarsos, a Modular Platform for Precise Pitch Analysis 
            of Western and Non-Western Music},
  journal = {Journal of New Music Research},
  volume = {42},
  number = {2},
  pages = {113-129},
  year = {2013},
  doi = {10.1080/09298215.2013.797999},
 URL = {http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09298215.2013.797999}
}

featured, Research papers, HoGent, Tarsos, Computational ethnomusicology, Music Information Retrieval, JNMR, and Java

jnmr.cover.jpg, 08._Ladrang_Kandamanyura_10s-20s_up.wav, and 2013.08.20.tarsos_jnmr_author_version.pdf

~ FMA 2013 - Computer Assisted Transcripton of Ethnic Music

At the third international workshop on Folk Music Analysis we presented a poster titled Computer Assisted Transcription of Ethnic Music]. The workshop took place in Amsterdam, Netherlands, June 6 and 7, 2013.

In the extended abstract, also titled Computer Assisted Transcription of Ethnic Music, it is described how the Tarsos software program now has features aiding transcription. Tarsos is especially practical for ethnic music of which the tone scale is not known beforehand. The proceedings of FMA 2013 are available as well.

During the conference there also was an interesting panel on transcription. The following people participated: John Ashley Burgoyne, moderator (University of Amsterdam), Kofi Agawu (Princeton University), Dániel P. Biró (University of Victoria), Olmo Cornelis (University College Ghent, Belgium), Emilia Gómez (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona), and Barbara Titus (Utrecht University). Some pictures can be found below.

Computational musicology, featured, Tarsos, Research papers, Computational ethnomusicology, HoGent, Java, and Folk Music Analysis (FMA) conference

A0-Poster.pdf, FMA_2013.computer_assisted_transcription.pdf, A0-Poster.jpg, FMA_2013.computer_assisted_transcription.pdf, IMG_20130607_152620.jpg, and IMG_20130607_140442.jpg

~ ICMC 2012 - Sound to Scale to Sound, a Setup for Microtonal Exploration and Composition

At this years ICMC Conference, ICMC 2012 we presented a paper describing a way to experiment with tone scales and how to use Tarsos as a compositional tool. What follows are some pointers to the presentation, paper and to other interesting talks that were presented there.

ICMC 2012 was organized in Ljubljana from the 9 to 14 septembre and had a very dense program of talks, posters, presentations, demos and concerts.

Since 1974 the International Computer Music Conference has been the major international forum for the presentation of the full range of outcomes from technical and musical research, both musical and theoretical, related to the use of computers in music. This annual conference regularly travels the globe, with recent conferences in the Americas, Europe and Asia. This year we welcome the conference to Slovenia for the first time.

Sound to Scale to Sound, a Setup for Microtonal Exploration and Composition

Our contribution to the conference was a paper titled Sound to Scale to Sound, a Setup for Microtonal Exploration and Composition.

If you want to cite our work, this BibTeX entry is included for your convenience:

  









  
@inproceedings{cornelis2012sound_to_scale,
  author     = {Olmo Cornelis and Joren Six},
  title      = {{Sound to Scale to Sound, a Setup for Microtonal Exploration and Composition}},
  booktitle  = {{Proceedings of the 2012 International Computer Music Conference,
               (ICMC 2012)}},
  year       = {2012},
  publisher = {The International Computer Music Association}
}

Program highlights

What follows are a number of pointers to my personal program highlights.

Verena Thomas presented two very well polished software tools. One to detect patterns in scores, called motifviewer and a tool to search in score databases in a multi-modal way. The Probado tool does score-to-audio alignment and much more.

Gibber is an impressive live-coding environment with an easy syntax. Since it is all done with javascript you can start playing with it immediately. Overtone Another live-coding environment, presented at the conference by Sam Aaron, was equally impressive. It is programmed using the Closure language.

At ICMC there were a number of tools to assist in composition. One of those is The Bach Project, by Andrea Agostini. Togheter with CatART by Diemo Swartz it forms a very expressive platform to work with sound, which was demonstrated by Aaron Einbond and Christopher Trapani in their paper titled Precise Pitch Control In Real Time Corpus-Based Concatenative Synthesis. Diemo Swartz presented work on Audio Mosaicing, it can be seen as a follow-up to AuidioGuild by Ben Hackbarth.

I also got to know the work by Thomas Grill, on his website a nice piece of software can be found a Python implementation of the Non Stationary Gabor Transform. Another software system I got to know is the functional signal processing programming language FAUST

My personal highlights of the concert programme include the works by Johannes Kreidler, Aura Pon, Daniel Mayer, Alexander Schubert and the remarkable performance by Dexter Ford. The concept behind Soundlog by Johannes Kretz was also interesting.

Presentation

icmc2012_submission_45.pdf, 2012.09.08-Sound_to_Scale_to_Sound__a_Setup_for_Microtonal_Exploration_and_Composition.odp, and ICMC_Logo.png

~ CIM 2012 - Revealing and Listening to Scales From the Past; Tone Scale Analysis of Archived Central-African Music Using Computational Means

What follows is about the Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology and the 15th international Conference of the Gesellschaft fur Musikfoschung. First this text will give information about our contribution to CIM2012: Revealing and Listening to Scales From the Past; Tone Scale Analysis of Archived Central-African Music Using Computational Means and then a number of highlights of the conference follow. The joint conference took place from the 4th to the 8th of september 2012.

In 2012, CIM will tackle the subject of History. Hosted by the University of Göttingen, whose one time music director Johann Nikolaus Forkel is widely regarded as one of the founders of modern music historiography, CIM12 aims to promote collaborations that provoke and explore new methods and methodologies for establishing, evaluating, preserving and communicating knowledge of music and musical practices of past societies and the factors implicated in both the preservation and transformation of such practices over time.

Revealing and Listening to Scales From the Past; Tone Scale Analysis of Archived Central-African Music Using Computational Means

Our contribution ton CIM 2012 is titled Revealing and Listening to Scales From the Past; Tone Scale Analysis of Archived Central-African Music Using Computational Means. The aim was to show how tone scales of the past, e.g. organ tuning, can be extracted and sonified. During the demo special attention was given to historic Central African tuning systems. The presentation I gave is included below and or available for download

Highlights

What follows are some personal highlights for the Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology and the 15th international Conference of the Gesellschaft fur Musikfoschung. The joint conference took place from the 4th to the 8th of september 2012.

The work presented by Rytis Ambrazevicius et al. Modal changes in traditional Lithuanian singing: Diachronic aspect has a lot in common with our research, it was interesting to see their approach. Another highlight of the conference was the whole session organized by Klaus-Peter Brenner around Mbira music.

Rainer Polak gave a talk titled ‘Swing, Groove and Metre. Asymmetric Feels, Metric Ambiguity and Metric Transformation in African Musics’. He showed how research about rhythm in jazz research, music theory and empirical musicology ( amongst others) could be bridged and applied to ethnic music.

The overview Eleanore Selfridge-Field gave during her talk Between an Analogue Past and a Digital Future: The Evolving Digital Present was refreshing. She had a really clear view on all the different ways musicology and digital media can benifit from each-other.

From the concert programme I found two especially interesting: the lecture-performance by Margarete Maierhofer-Lischka and Frauke Aulbert of Lotofagos, a piece by Beat Furrer and Burdocks composed and performed by Christian Wolff and a bunch of enthusiastic students.

Presentation and Research papers

CIM12_Submission.pdf, 2012.09.05-Revealing_and_listening_to_scales_from_the_past__tone_scale_analysis_of_archived_Central-African_music_using_computational_means..ppt, and Forkeljpg.jpg

~ Analytical Approaches To World Music - Microtonal Scale Exploration in Central Africa

At the 2012 AAWM conference we presented a way to explore tone scales in the music of Central Africa. Since the audience consisted of (ethno)musicologists, the main focus of the presentation was on the applicication part, the technical aspects were only briefly mentioned.

The extended abstract can be consulted: Towards the tangible: microtonal scale exploration in Central-African music

The conference program itself was very diverse and interesting.

Presentation

2012.05.11-Towards_the_Tangible_-_Microtonal_Scale_Exploration_in_Central-African_Music.odp and AAWM_abstract_short.doc

~ Guest Lecture at MIT - Ethnic Music Analysis: Challenges & Opportunities - Tarsos as a Case Study

Thursday the 3th of May I gave a guest lecture titled ‘Ethnic Music Analysis: Challenges & Opportunities’ it featured Tarsos as a Case Study. The goal was to identify the difficulties when dealing with ethnic music and to show a possible approach, the approach implemented by Tarsos.

The invitation to give the guest lecture came from Michael Cuthbert who is one of the driving forces behind music21. The audience was a small group of double majors in both musicology and computer science: the ideal profile to gather useful feedback.

Presentation

2012.05.03-Ethnic_Music_Analysis.odp and 2012.05.03-Ethnic_Music_Analysis.pdf

~ Kinderuniversiteit - Muziek onder de microscoop!

Zondag 18 december 2011 gaf ik een workshop voor de Gentse kinderuniversiteit. Het thema van de kinderuniversiteit was Muziek onder de microscoop. De teaser voor de workshop is hier te vinden:

WORKSHOP – Muziek (ont)luisteren op de computer
Is het mogelijk om piano te spelen op een tafel? Kan een computer luisteren naar muziek en er van genieten? Wat is muziek eigenlijk, en hoe werkt geluid?
Tijdens deze workshop worden de voorgaande vragen beantwoord met enkele computerprogramma’s!

Concreet worden enkele componenten van geluid (en bij uitbreiding, muziek) gedemonstreerd met computerprogrammaatjes gemaakt in het conservatorium:

• Geluidssterkte: een decibel-meter met een bepaalde drempelwaarde. Probeer zo luid mogelijk te doen en zie hoe moeilijk het is om, eens een bepaald niveau bereikt is, in decibel te stijgen.
• Toonhoogte: een klein spelletje om toonhoogte aan te tonen. Probeer zo juist mogelijk te zingen of te fluiten en vergelijk je score.
• Percussie: dit programma reageert op handgeklap. Hoe kan je het onderscheid maken tussen bijvoorbeeld een fluittoon en handgeklap?

De foto’s hieronder geven een sfeerbeeld.

Presentation

SoundDetector.jar, logo-with-arrow.png, UtterAsterisk.jar, PercussionDetector.jar, and PitchDetector.jar

~ Software for Music Analysis

Friday the second of December I presented a talk about software for music analysis. The aim was to make clear which type of research topics can benefit from measurements by software for music analysis. Different types of digital music representations and examples of software packages were explained.

Following presentation was used during the talk. (ppt, odp):

• Sonic Visualizer: As its name suggests Sonic Visualizer contains a lot different visualisations for audio. It can be used for analysis (pitch,beat,chroma,…) with VAMP-plugins. To quote “The aim of Sonic Visualiser is to be the first program you reach for when want to study a musical recording rather than simply listen to it”. It is the swiss army knife of audio analysis.
• BeatRoot is designed specifically for one goal: beat tracking. It can be used for e.g. comparing tempi of different performances of the same piece or to track tempo deviation within one piece.
• Tartini is capable to do real-time pitch analysis of sound. You can e.g. play into a microphone with a violin and see the harmonics you produce and adapt you playing style based on visual feedback. It also contains a pitch deviation measuring apparatus to analyse vibrato.
• Tarsos is software for tone scale analysis. It is useful to extract tone scales from audio. Different tuning systems can be seen, extracted and compared. It also contains the ability to play along with the original song with a tuned midi keyboard .

To show the different digital representations of music one example (Liebestraum 3 by Liszt) was used in different formats:

• Score
• MusicXML
• MIDI as notation
• MIDI as performance
• Acoustic performance

Presentation

01.musicXML-liebestraum_no_3.xml, digital_registration_software.png, 01.MusicXML-extract.txt, 00.partituur.liebestraum_3.pdf, digital_registration_filetypes.png, 03.human.performance.wav, 2011.12.02.software_for_music_analysis.odp, 2011.12.02.software_for_music_analysis.ppt, 01.deadpan_midi.wav, 02.performed_midi.wav, and 2011.12.02.software_for_music_analysis.pdf