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Articles Tagged 'featured'

~ 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.

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@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}
}

~ 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.

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@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}
}

~ 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.

Computer Assited Transcription of Ethnic Music poster

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.


~ Tarsos 1.0: Transcription Features

Today marks the reslease of Tarsos 1.0 . The new Tarsos release contains practical transcription features. As can be seen in the screenshot below, a time stretching feature makes it easy to loop a certain audio fragment while it is playing in a slow tempo. The next loop can be played with by pressing the n key, the one before by pressing b.

Since the pitch classes can be found in a song, and there is a feature that lets you play a MIDI keyboard in the tone scale of the song under analysis, transcription of ethnic music is made a lot easier.


Tarsos 1.0

The new release of Tarsos can be found in the Tarsos release repository. From now on, nightly releases are uploaded there automatically.


~ Pitch Shifting - Implementation in Pure Java with Resampling and Time Stretching

The DSP library for Taros, aptly named TarsosDSP, now includes an implementation of a pitch shifting algorithm (as of version 1.4). The goal of pitch shifting is to change the pitch of a piece of audio without affecting the duration. The algorithm implemented is a combination of resampling and time stretching. Resampling changes the pitch of the audio, but affects the total duration. Consecutively, the duration of the audio is stretched to the original (without affecting pitch) with time stretching. The result is very similar to phase vocoding.

The example application below shows how to pitch shift input from the microphone in real-time, or pitch shift a recorded track with the TarsosDSP library.

Pitch shifting in Java

To test the application, download and execute the PitchShift.jar file and load an audio file. For the moment only 44.1kHz mono wav is allowed. To get started you can try this piece of audio.

There is also a command line interface, the following command lowers the pitch of in.wav by two semitones.

java -jar in.wav out.wav -200

----------------------------------------------------
 _______                       _____   _____ _____  
|__   __|                     |  __ \ / ____|  __ \ 
   | | __ _ _ __ ___  ___  ___| |  | | (___ | |__) |
   | |/ _` | '__/ __|/ _ \/ __| |  | |\___ \|  ___/ 
   | | (_| | |  \__ \ (_) \__ \ |__| |____) | |     
   |_|\__,_|_|  |___/\___/|___/_____/|_____/|_|     
                                                    
----------------------------------------------------
Name:
	TarsosDSP Pitch shifting utility.
----------------------------------------------------
Synopsis:
	java -jar PitchShift.jar source.wav target.wav cents
----------------------------------------------------
Description:
	Change the play back speed of audio without changing the pitch.

		source.wav	A readable, mono wav file.
		target.wav	Target location for the pitch shifted file.
		cents		Pitch shifting in cents: 100 means one semitone up, 
				-100 one down, 0 is no change. 1200 is one octave up.

The resampling feature was implemented with libresample4j by Laszlo Systems. libresample4j is a Java port of Dominic Mazzoni’s libresample 0.1.3, which is in turn based on Julius Smith’s Resample 1.7 library.


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

Logo Universiteit UtrechtWhat 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.


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

Logo Universiteit UtrechtAt 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:

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@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.


~ 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.


~ TarsosDSP Release 1.0

After about a year of development and several revisions TarsosDSP has enough features and is stable enough to slap the 1.0 tag onto it. A ‘read me’, manual, API documentation, source and binaries can be found on the TarsosDSP release directory. The source is present in the
What follows below is the information that can be found in the read me file:

TarsosDSP is a collection of classes to do simple audio processing. It features an implementation of a percussion onset detector and two pitch detection algorithms: Yin and the Mcleod Pitch method. Also included is a Goertzel DTMF decoding algorithm and a time stretch algorithm (WSOLA).

Its aim is to provide a simple interface to some audio (signal) processing algorithms implemented in pure JAVA. Some TarsosDSP example applications are available.

The following example filters a band of frequencies of an input file testFile. It keeps the frequencies form startFrequency to stopFrequency.

AudioInputStream inputStream = AudioSystem.getAudioInputStream(testFile);
AudioDispatcher dispatcher = new AudioDispatcher(inputStream,stepSize,overlap);
dispatcher.addAudioProcessor(new HighPass(startFrequency, sampleRate, overlap));
dispatcher.addAudioProcessor(new LowPassFS(stopFrequency, sampleRate, overlap));
dispatcher.addAudioProcessor(new FloatConverter(format));
dispatcher.addAudioProcessor(new WaveformWriter(format,stepSize, overlap, "filtered.wav"));
dispatcher.run();

Quickly Getting Started with TarsosDSP

Head over to the TarsosDSP release repository and download the latest TarsosDSP library. To get up to speed quickly, check the TarsosDSP Example applications for inspiration and consult the API documentation. If you, for some reason, want to build from source, you need Apache Ant and git installed on your system. The following commands fetch the source and build the library and example jars:

git clone https://JorenSix@github.com/JorenSix/TarsosDSP.git
cd TarsosDSP/build
ant tarsos_dsp_library #Builds the core TarsosDSP library
ant build_examples #Builds all the TarsosDSP examples
ant javadoc #Creates the documentation in TarsosDSP/doc

When everything runs correctly you should be able to run all example applications and have the latest version of the TarsosDSP library for inclusion in your projects. Also the Javadoc documentation for the API should be available in TarsosDSP/doc. Drop me a line if you use TarsosDSP in your project. Always nice to hear how this software is used.

Source Code Organization and Examples of TarsosDSP

The source tree is divided in three directories:


~ The Power of the Pentatonic Scale

The following video shows Bobby McFerrin demonstrating the power of the pentatonic scale. It is a fascinating demonstration of how quickly a (western) audience of the World Science Festival 2009 adapts to an unusual tone scale:

With Tarsos the scale used in the example can be found. This is the result of a quick analysis: it becomes clear that this, in fact, a pentatonic scale with an unequal octave division. A perfect fifth is present between 255 and 753 cents:

A pentatonic scale, demonstrated by Bobby McFerrin

~ Robust Audio Fingerprinting with Tarsos and Pitch Class Histograms

The aim of acoustic fingerprinting is to generate a small representation of an audio signal that can be used to identify or recognize similar audio samples in a large audio set. A robust fingerprint generates similar fingerprints for perceptually similar audio signals. A piece of music with a bit of noise added should generate an almost identical fingerprint as the original. The use cases for audio fingerprinting or acoustic fingerprinting are myriad: detection of duplicates, identifying songs, recognizing copyrighted material,…

Using a pitch class histogram as a fingerprint seems like a good idea: it is unique for a song and it is reasonably robust to changes of the underlying audio (length, tempo, pitch, noise). The idea has probably been found a couple of times independently, but there is also a reference to it in the literature, by Tzanetakis, 2003: Pitch Histograms in Audio and Symbolic Music Information Retrieval:

Although mainly designed for genre classification it is possible that features derived from Pitch Histograms might also be applicable to the problem of content-based audio identification or audio fingerprinting (for an example of such a system see (Allamanche et al., 2001)). We are planning to explore this possibility in the future.

Unfortunately they never, as far as I know, did explore this possibility, and I also do not know if anybody else did. I found it worthwhile to implement a fingerprinting scheme on top of the Tarsos software foundation. Most elements are already available in the Tarsos API: a way to detect pitch, construct a pitch class histogram, correlate pitch class histograms with a pitch shift,… I created a GUI application which is presented here. It is, probably, the first open source acoustic / audio fingerprinting system based on pitch class histograms.

Audio fingerprinter based on pitch class histograms

It works using drag and drop and the idea is to find a needle (an audio file) in a hay stack (a large amount of audio files). For every audio file in the haystack and for the needle pitch is detected using an optimized, for speed, Yin implementation. A pitch class histogram is created for each file, the histogram for the needle is compared with each histogram in the hay stack and, hopefully, the needle is found in the hay stack.

Unfortunately I do not have time for rigorous testing (by building a large acoustic fingerprinting data set, or an other decent test bench) but the idea seems to work. With the following modifications, done with audacity effects the needle was still found a hay stack of 836 files :

The following modifications failed to identify the correct song:

The original was also found. No failure analysis was done. The hay stack consists of about 100 hours of western pop, the needle is also a western pop song. If somebody wants to pick up this work or has an acoustic fingerprinting data set or drop me a line at .

The source code is available, as always, on the Tarsos GitHub page.


~ Tarsos at 'WASPAA 2011'

Tarsos LogoDuring the the demo session of the IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics a demonstration of Tarsos was given. During the demo, the 18th of Octobre 2011 feedback was gathered.

During the conference I met interesting people and their work:

Carnatic Music Analysis: Shadja, Swara Identification and Raga Verification in Alapana using Stochastic Models
Ranjani HG, Arthi S, Sreenivas TV

Simulation of the Violin Section Sound based on the analysis of orchestra performance
Jukka Pätynen, Sakari Tervo, Tapio Lokki

Another interesting paper is Informed Source Separation: Source Coding Meets Source Separation. A demo of this can be found here.


~ Tarsos at 'ISMIR 2011'

Tarsos LogoA paper about Tarsos was submitted for review at the 12th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference which will be held in Miami. The paper Tarsos – a Platform to Explore Pitch Scales in Non-Western and Western Music was reviewed and accepted, it will be published in this year’s proceedings of the ISMIR conference. It can be read below as well.

An oral presentation about Tarsos is going to take place Tuesday, the 25 of October during the afternoon, as can be seen on the ISMIR preliminary program schedule.

If you want to cite our work, please use the following data:

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@inproceedings{six2011tarsos,
  author     = {Joren Six and Olmo Cornelis},
  title      = {Tarsos - a Platform to Explore Pitch Scales 
                in Non-Western and Western Music},
  booktitle  = {Proceedings of the 12th International 
                Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference,
                ISMIR 2011},
  year       = {2011},
  publisher  = {International Society for Music Information Retrieval}
}


~ Tarsos at 'IPEM Open House'

IPEM Logo The 25th of May 2011 Tarsos was present at the IPEM open house.

IPEM (Institute for Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music) is the research center of the Department of Musicology, which is part of the Department of Art, Music and Theater Studies of Ghent University. IPEM provides a scientific basis for the cultural and creative sector, especially for music and performance arts, and does pioneering research work on the relationship between music body movement and new technologies. The institute consists of an interdisciplinary team but also welcomes visiting researchers from all over the world. One of its aims is also to actively try and validate research results during public events and by means of user studies.

There are close relations between the Royal Conservatory Ghent, where we are located, and IPEM. There is more information about the IPEM open house available. Also available is the program of the IPEM open house 2011

Tarsos was presented using a poster, a flyer and a live demo. The poster about Tarsos and the flyer about Tarsos are both downloadable.


~ Tarsos at 'First International Workhop of Folk Music Analysis'

Tarsos LogoTarsos will be presented at the First International Workhop of Folk Music Analysis: Symbolic and Signal Processing:

“The First International Workhop of Folk Music Analysis: Symbolic and Signal Processing, will take place in Athens, Greece, on the 19th and 20th of May, 2011. … The purpose of the event is to gather reseachers who work in the area of computational folk music analysis, using symbolic or singal processing methods, to present their work, discuss and exchange views on the topic.”

The submitted abstract about Tarsos can be downloaded. A presentation about Tarsos is also available.


~ TarsosDSP: a small JAVA audio processing library

TarsosDSP is a collection of classes to do simple audio processing. It features an implementation of a percussion onset detector and two pitch detection algorithms: Yin and the Mcleod Pitch method.

Its aim is to provide a simple interface to some audio (signal) processing algorithms implemented in JAVA.

To make some of the possibilities clear I coded some examples.

The source code of TarsosDSP is available on github.

Presentation at Newline

Saturday the 25th of March TarsosDSP was presented at Newline, a small conference organized by whitespace. Here you can download the slides I used to present TarsosDSP, I also created an introductory text on sound and Java.


~ Tarsos at 'Lectures on Computational Ethnomusicology'

Tarsos Logo This monday the 28th of February Tarsos will be presented at “Lectures on Computational Ethnomusicology” which is held at Izmir, Turkey. The presentation of Tarsos is available here.

Next to the interesting programme it is a great opportunity to meet Baris Bozkurt who has been working on similar research but applied to Makam music.

On wednesday the second of March there is a small seminar at Electrical and Electronics Eng. Dept. of İzmir Yüksek Teknoloji Enstitüsü where Tarsos will be presented also.


~ Tarsos Live - Real Time Tone Scale Analysis

Tarsos LogoA new version of Tarsos was uploaded today and it contains an exciting (at least my kind of exciting) new feature. It is capable of real-time pitch analysis and tone scale construction. A video should make its use clear:

The immediate feedback is practical for educational purposes: it makes rather vague things like quarter tones or (uncommon) pitch intervals in general quite tangible. It could be used by singers or string players to explore microtonality or to improve their technique. Another use case is ethnomusicologic field-work: if you would want to research Kora tuning (an African harp) Tarsos could be a practical tool for real-time analysis.

Thanks to Olmo Cornelis and Wannes Gonnissen for playing the thumb piano and Saz respectively.


~ Digital Music Research Network Workshop - Queen Mary University London

Queen Mary University Logo

Monday the 20th and Tuesday the 21th of December I attended two workshops at The Queen Mary University of London: The Machine Listening Workshop and Digital Music Research Network One-day Workshop 2010

At the workshop I had an interesting meeting with Dan Tidhar. He researches harpsichord temperament estimation at QMUL. Together they created the Tempest web service where you can upload harpsichord audio and let the system guess the temperament. The process is described in the paper “High precision frequency estimation for harpsichord tuning classification”. Although Tarsos was not officially part of the programme I hijacked the poster sessions to show a live demo of Tarsos with Dan’s dataset.

Another interesting talk was about 2032, a tunable synthesizer with definable Harmonics. It elaborates on the ideas of Sethares about tone scales .


~ Groovy Tarsos Scripting

Groovy Logo

There is more to Tarsos then meets te eye. The graphical user interface only exposes some functionality; the API exposes all of Tarsos’ capabilities.

Tarsos is programmed in Java so the API is accessible trough Java and other programming languages targeting the JVM like JRuby, Scala and Groovy. The following examples use the Groovy programming language because I find it the most aesthetically pleasing with regards to interoperability and it gets the job done without getting in your way.

To run the examples a copy of the Tarsos JAR-file needs to be added to the Classpath and the Groovy runtime must be installed correctly. I’ll leave this as an exercise for the reader: godspeed to you, brave soul. Quick protip: placing a copy of the jar in the extensions directory seems to work best, e.g. see important java directories on mac OS X.

The first example extracts pitch class histograms from a bunch of files and saves them as EPS-files. It iterates a directory recursively and handles each file that matches a given regular expression. In this example the regular expression matches all WAV-files. Batch processing is one of those things scripting is ideal for, doing the same thing with the user interface would be tedious or even mind-numbingly boring, not groovy at all indeed.

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import be.hogent.tarsos.*
import be.hogent.tarsos.util.*
import be.hogent.tarsos.util.histogram.ToneScaleHistogram
import be.hogent.tarsos.sampled.pitch.Annotation
import be.hogent.tarsos.sampled.pitch.PitchDetectionMode

dir = "/home/joren/audio"

FileUtils.glob(dir,".*.wav",true).each { file ->
        audioFile = new AudioFile(file)
        pitchDetector = PitchDetectionMode.TARSOS_YIN.getPitchDetector(audioFile)
        pitchDetector.executePitchDetection()
        //get some annotations
        annotations = pitchDetector.getAnnotations()
        //create an ambitus and tone scale histogram
        ambitusHistogram = Annotation.ambitusHistogram(annotations)
        toneScaleHisto = ambitusHistogram.toneScaleHistogram()
        //plot a smoothed version of the histogram
        p = new SimplePlot()
        p.addData 0, toneScaleHisto.gaussianSmooth(0.2)
        p.save FileUtils.basename( file) + ".eps"
}

The second example uses functionality that is currently only available trough the API. It takes a MIDI-file and synthesizes it to a wave file using an arbitrary scale. In this case 10-TET. The heavy-work is done by the Gervill synthesizer. The resulting file is available for download, micro—macro?—tonal Bach is great: BWV 1013 in 10-TET. The result of an analysis with Tarsos on the synthesized audio clearly shows an interval of 120 cents with some deviations.

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import java.io.File
import be.hogent.tarsos.midi.MidiToWavRenderer
import be.hogent.tarsos.util.ScalaFile

midiFile = new File("BWV_1013.mid")
outFile = new File("out.wav")

tuning = [0,120,240,360,480,600,720,840,960,1080] as double []

MidiToWavRenderer renderer
renderer = new MidiToWavRenderer()
renderer.setTuning(tuning)
renderer.createWavFile(midiFile, outFile)

An extended version of this second example script could be used to generate a dataset with audio and corresponding tone scale information on the fly. The dataset could then be used as a baseline.

The API is not yet well documented and is still in flux or more correctly: superflux. Note to self: I will provide documentation and a number of useful examples when the dust settles down. I’m not even sure if I will stick with Groovy. Scala has a nice Lispy feel to it and seems more developed. Groovy has a less steep learning curve, especially if you have some experience with Ruby. JRuby is also nice but the interoperability with legacy Java looks like an ugly hack.


~ Tarsos Presented at the "Perspectives for Computational Musicology" Symposium

Tarsos Logo Yesterday Tarsos was publicly presented at the symposium Perspectives for Computational Musicology in Amsterdam. The first public presentation of Tarsos, excluding this website. The symposium was organized by the Meertens Institute on the occasion of Peter van Kranenburg’s PhD defense.

The presentation included a live demo of a daily build of Tarsos (a Friday evening build) which worked, surprisingly, without hiccups. The presentation was done by Olmo Cornelis. This was the small introduction:

Tarsos – a Platform for Pitch Analysis of Ethnic Music
Ethnic music is a vulnerable cultural heritage that has received only recently more attention within the Music Information Retrieval community. However, access to ethnic music remains problematic, as this music does not always correspond to the Western concepts of music and metadata that underlie the currently available content-based methods. During this lecture, we like to present our current research on pitch analysis of African music. TARSOS, a platform for analysis, will be presented as a powerful tool that can describe and compare scales with great detail.

To give Tarsos a try ou can start Tarsos using JAVA WebStart or download the executable Tarsos JAR-file. A JAVA 1.5 runtime is required.


~ Tarsos User Interface Prototype

Tarsos now has an easy to use drag and drop User Interface. It can be used to extract tone scale information from audio files.

Start tarsos using JAVA WebStart.

Drag and drop works for scala tone scale files and different kinds of audio files. Audiofiles are transcoded automagically using an embedded ffmpeg binary which is platform dependend. It works on linux and windows, on other platforms only WAV files are supported.

Some of the current features:


~ Rendering MIDI Using Arbitrary Tone Scales

Tarsos can be used to render MIDI files to audio (WAV) files using arbitrary tone scales. This functionallity can be used to (automatically) verify tone scale extraction from audio files. Since I could not find a dataset with audio and corresponding tone scales creating one using MIDI seemed a good idea.

MIDI files can be found in spades, tone scales on the other hand are harder to find. Luckily there is one massive source, the Scala Tone Scale Archive: A large collection of over 3700 tone scales.

Using Scala tone scale files and a midi files a Tone Scale – Audio dataset can be generated. The quality of the audio depends on the (software) synthesizer and the SoundFont used. Tarsos currently uses the Gervill synthesizer. Gervill is a pure Java software synthesizer with support for 24bit SoundFonts and the MIDI tuning standard.

How To Render MIDI Using Arbitrary Tone Scales with Tarsos

A recent version of the JRE needs to be installed on your system if you want to use Tarsos. Tarsos itself can be downloaded in the form of the Tarsos JAR Package.

Currently Tarsos has a Command Line Interface. An example with the files you can find attached:

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java -jar tarsos.jar --midi BWV_1007.mid --scala 120.scl --out bach.wav

The result of this command should yield an audio file that sounds like the cello suites of bach in a nonsensical tone scale with steps of 120 cents. Executing tone scale extraction on the generated audo yields the expected result. In the pich class histogram every 120 cents a peak can be found.

To summarize: by rendering audio with MIDI and Scala tone scale files a dataset with tone scale – audio information can be generated and tone scale extraction algorithms can be tested on the fly.

This method also has some limitations. Because audio is rendered there is no (background) noise, no fluctuations in pitch and timbre,… all of which are present in recorded audio. So testing testing tone scale extraction algorithms on recorded audio remains advised.


~ Tone Scale Matching With Tarsos

Tarsos can be used to search for music that uses a certain tone scale or tone interval(s). Tone scales can be defined by a Scala tone scale file or an exemplifying audio file. This text explains how you can use Tarsos for this task.

Search Using Scala Tone Scale Files

Scala files are text files with information about a tone scale. It is used to share and exchange tone scales. The file format originates from the Scala program :

Scala is a powerful software tool for experimentation with musical tunings, such as just intonation scales, equal and historical temperaments, microtonal and macrotonal scales, and non-Western scales. It supports scale creation, editing, comparison, analysis, …

The Scala file format is popular because there is a library with more than 3000 tone scales available on the Scala website.

Tarsos also understands Scala files. It is able to create a pitch class histogram using a gaussian mixture model. A technique described in A. C. Gedik, B.Bozkurt, 2010, "Pitch Frequency Histogram Based Music Information Retrieval for Turkish Music ", Signal Processing, vol.10, pp.1049-1063. (doi:10.106/j.sigpro.2009.06.017).

An example should make things clear. Lets search for an interval of 300 cents or exactly three semitones. A scala file with this interval is easy to define:

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! example.scl
! An example of a tone interval of 300 cents
Tone interval of 300 cents
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!
900
1200.0

The next step is to create a histogram with an interval of 300 cents. In the block diagram this step is called “Peak histogram creation”. The Similarity calculation step expects a list of histograms to compare with the newly defined histogram. Feeding the similarity calculation with the western12ET tone scale and a pentatonic Indonesian Slendro tone scale shows that a 300 cents interval is used in the western tone scale but is not available in the Slendro tone scale.

This example only uses scala files, creating histograms is actually not needed: calculating intervals can be done using the scala file itself. This changes when audio files are compared with each other or with scala files.

Search Using Audio Files

When audio files are fed to the algorithm additional steps need to be taken.

  1. First of all pitch detection is executed on the audio file. Currently two pitch extractors are implemented in pure Java, it is also possible to use an external pitch extractor such as aubio
  2. Using pitch annotations a Pitch Histogram is created.
  3. Peak detection on the Pitch Histogram results in a number of peaks, these should represent the distinct pitch classes used in the musical piece.
  4. With the pitch classes a clean peak histogram is created during the Peak Histogram construction phase.
  5. Finally the Peak histogram is matched with other histograms.

The last two steps are the same for audio files or scala files.

Using real audio files can cause dirty histograms. Determining how many distinct pitch classes are used is no trivial task, even for an expert (human) listener. Tarsos should provide a semi-automatic way of peak extraction: a best guess by an algorithm that can easily be corrected by a user. For the moment Tarsos does not allow manual intervention.

Tarsos

To use tarsos you need a recent java runtime (1.6) and the following command line arguments:

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java -jar tarsos.jar rank --detector TARSOS_MPM 
--needle audio.wav --haystack scala.scl other_audio.wav other_scala_file.scl

~ Static Code Analysis For Java Using Eclipse

This post is about the tools I use to keep the source code of Tarsos reasonably clean, consistent and readable. Static code analysis can be of great help if you want to maintain strict coding standards and follow language idioms. Some of the patterns they can detect for you:

And even more subtle, but equally important:

In a previous life I used .NET and the static code analysis tools FxCop & StyleCop. FxCop operates on bytecode (or intermediate language in .NET parlance) level, StyleCop analyses the source code itself. Tarsos uses JAVA so I looked for JAVA alternatives and found a few.

On freesoftwaremagazine.com there is an article series on JAVA static code analysis software. It covers PMD and FixBugs and integration in Eclipse. It does not cover Checkstyle. Checkstyle is essentialy the same as PMD but it is better integrated in eclipse: it checks code on save and uses the standard ‘Problems’ interface, PMD does not.

To fix problems Eclipse save actions can save you some time. IBM has an article on how to keep your code clean using Eclipse.

Continuous testing is also a really nice thing to have: detecting unexpected behavior while refactoring/programming can prevent unnecessary bug hunts. A video about immediate feedback using continuous testing makes this clear.

Another tip is a more philosophical one: making your code and code revisions publicly available makes you think twice before implementing (and subsequently publishing) a quick and dirty hack. Tarsos is available on github.

References


~ Tarsos on GitHub

The JAVA software program we are developing is called Tarsos and can now be found on GitHub. GitHub is a web-based hosting service for projects that use the Git version control system.

Currently Tarsos is a collection of Java classes to create, compare and process pitch-frequency data using histograms. In it’s current state it is not usable for end-users.

Credits

Tarsos is developed at University College Ghent, Faculty of Music and uses a number of open source libraries: