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~ HTML5 spectrogram on canvas with pitch estimation

To present my research in an accessible way I needed a reliable way to visualize audio, audio feature extraction and processing of audio features into a higher level representation. Canvas, HTML5, javascript and the Reveal.js presentation framework offered a solution.

I often need audio and video material embedded into presentations. I have had bad experiences with powerpoint/keynote and especially the LaTeX beamer package and multimedia: audio/video material does not start playing or at the wrong moment, finicky on codecs, limited compatibility, a clunky UX (whoever came up with the idea to show multimedia controls while hovering over e.g. an audio thumbnail should be reoriented towards back-end programming) all contribute to errors while handling audio/video. Moreover the interactive capabilities are limiting.

The component above is an interactive spectrogram which combines HTML5’s web audio API capabilities with the canvas element and some Javascript to glue things together. Note that this has been tested on Chrome and Firefox only.

To experiment with the capabilities you can either drag and drop mp3 files or analyse live audio from your microphone

This is based on the spectrogram implementation by GitHub user Boris Smus. The live pitch tracking is implemented by Peter Hayes which again is based on my own Java code.


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

Together with Federica Bressan I have contributed to the Italian Research Conference on Digital Libraries 2018:

“Since 2005, the Italian Research Conference on Digital Libraries has served as an important national forum focused on digital libraries and associated technical, practical, and social issues. IRCDL encompasses the many meanings of the term “digital libraries”, including new forms of information institutions; operational information systems with all manner of digital content; new means of selecting, collecting, organizing, and distributing digital content…"

The 26th of January Federica presented our joint contribution titled “Applications of Duplicate Detection in Music Archives: from Metadata Comparison to Storage Optimisation”. The work focuses on applications of duplicate detection for managing digital music archives. It aims to make this mature music information retrieval (MIR) technology better known to archivists and provide clear suggestions on how this technology can be used in practice. More specifically applications are discussed to complement meta-data, to link or merge digital music archives, to improve listening experiences and to re-use segmentation data.

The version of record of the article and an author version are available. The presentation is available here as well.