~ Text to Speech to Speech Recognition - Am I Sitting in a Room?

This post is about a hack I did for the 2012 Amsterdam music hack days. From the website:

The Amsterdam Music Hack Day is a full weekend of hacking in which participants will conceptualize, create and present their projects. Music + software + mobile + hardware + art + the web. Anything goes as long as it’s music related

The hackathon was organized at the NiMK(Nederlands instituut voor Media Kunst) the 25th and 24th of May. My hack tries to let a phone start a conversation on its own. It does this by speaking a text and listening to the spoken text with speech recognition. The speech recognition introduces all kinds of interesting permutations of the original text. The recognized text is spoken again and so a dreamlike, unique nonsensical discussion starts. It lets you hear what goes on in the mind of the phone.

The idea is based on Alvin Lucier’s I am Sitting in a Room form 1969 which is embedded below. He used analogue tapes to generate a similar recursive loop. It is a better implementation of something I did a couple of years ago.

The implementation is done with Android and its API’s. Both speech recognition and text to speech are available on android. Those API’s are used and a user interface shows the recognized text. An example of a session can be found below:

To install the application you can download Tryalogue.apk of use the QR-code below. You need Android 2.3 with Voice Recognition and TTS installed. Also needed is an internet connection. The source is also up for grabs.

Muziek, Code, Poging tot humor, Projecten, Hackerspace Ghent, and 0110.be

apk.png, Tryalogue.zip, Tryalogue.apk, and screenshot.png

~ Oscilloscope in TarsosDSP

The DSP library for Taros, aptly named TarsosDSP, now includes an implementation of an oscilloscope.

The source code of the Java implementation can be found on the TarsosDSP github page. That is all.

TarsosDSP and HoGent

~ Dan Ellis' Robust Landmark-Based Audio Fingerprinting - With Octave

This blog post documents how to get the Matlab implementation by Dan Ellis of Avery Wangs Industrial-Strength Audio Search Algorithm running with GNU Octave on Ubuntu (and similar Linux distributions).

The Dan Ellis implementation is nicely documented here: Robust Landmark-Based Audio Fingerprinting . To download, get info about and decode mp3’s some external binaries are needed:

  













  
#install octave if needed
sudo apt-get install octave3.2
#Install the required dependencies for the script
sudo apt-get install mp3info curl

#mpg123 is not present as a package, install from source:
wget http://www.mpg123.de/download/mpg123-1.13.5.tar.bz2
tar xvvf mpg123-1.13.5.tar.bz2
cd mpg123-1.13.5/
./configure
make
sudo make install

In mp3read.m the following code was changed (line 111 and 112):

  



  
mpg123 = 'mpg123'; % was fullfile(path,['mpg123.',ext]);
mp3info = 'mp3info'; % was fullfile(path,['mp3info.',ext]);

Then, the demo program runs flawlessly when executing octave -q demo_fingerprint.m.

Running the demo with the original code with GNU Octave, version 3.2.3 takes 152 seconds on a PC with a Q9650 @ 3GHz processor. A small tweak can make it run almost 8 times faster. When working with larger data sets (10k audio files) this makes a big difference. I do not know why but storing a hash in the large hash table was really slow (0.5s per hash, with 900 hashes per song…). Caching the hashes and adding them all at once makes it faster (at least in Octave, YMMV). The optimized version of record_hashes.m can be found attached. With this alteration the same demo ran in 20s. When caching the data locally the difference is 11.5s to 141s or 12 times faster. The code with all the changes can be found here: Robust Landmark-Based Audio Fingerprinting – optimized for Octave 3.2. Please note again that the implementation is done by Dan Ellis (2009) ( available on Robust Landmark-Based Audio Fingerprinting) and I did only some small tweaks.

Code and HoGent

fingerprint_fast.zip and record_hashes.m.txt

~ Harmony and Variation in Music Information Retrieval

The 29th of February 2012 there was a symposium on Music Information Retreival in Utrecht. It was organized on the occasion of Bas de Haas’ PhD defense. The title of the study day was Harmony and variation in music information retrieval.

During the talk by Xavier Serra rasikas.org was mentioned a forum with discussions about Carnatic Music. Since I could find a couple of discussions about pitch use on that forum I plugged Tarsos there to see if I could gather some feedback.

Computational musicology and HoGent