artificial musicality

Cozzarelli Prize for the DarwinTunes paper

Matthias Mauch — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 18:18:17 +0000

For quite some time now this year’s Cozzarelli Prize winners have been announced, and I’m proudly in their midst, thanks mainly to the incredible work Bob MacCallum and Armand Leroi did on our paper on the “Evolution of Music by Public Choice“. The prize is awarded to six papers that “reflect scientific excellence and originality” and that were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS) the previous year. Though I’m just one little co-author, I’ll have the pleasure of flying out to Washington D.C. with Armand at the end of the month to take part in the PNAS Annual Meeting Awards Ceremony, though I expect that Armand will be on stage to actually receive it.

Descent of Pop — Irish radio interview

Matthias Mauch — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 15:09:16 +0000

I just had the most pleasant radio interview with Sean Moncrieff of Newstalk Radio, Dublin. From what I can tell it’s a great, interesting show in general, endorsed by the Open University. I seem to have got my point across, too: we’ve got new votes streaming in on the Descent of Pop survey just now.

You can listen to the interview here.

Thanks to Sean and the Newstalk team!

Vocal/instrumental activity ground truth data

Matthias Mauch — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 12:31:53 +0000

I thought it might be high time to remind the world of the ground truth data (zip archive here) that my colleagues at AIST and I annotated, and which accompanies my paper on vocal/instrumental solo detection. On the AIST annotation page, there are, of course, many other interesting annotations, so have a look around there, too! The ground truth is provided for the whole RWC pop corpus (100 songs).

Descent of Pop: help us out listening to music

Matthias Mauch — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 18:11:43 +0000

I’ve been involved in measuring the evolution of the charts for quite a while (at Last.fm, see the Anatomy of the Charts), and we’re opening a new chapter now. That new chapter needs your help! We want to dump those few annoying bad recordings from our database and learn about differences in audio quality in general.

Everything you need to know is on this website. But the real fun happens on the rating page.

It’s actually really interesting what crops up if you just randomly listen to the pop of the last 60 years, and if you do that for us, it would help us a lot.

So again, your help would be appreciated on this web page. You can also befriend us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/DescentOfPop

Teasing the Music out of Digital Data

Matthias Mauch — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 12:57:10 +0000

Today I had the pleasure to give a little seminar talk at the Technische UniversitÃ¤t Dortmund. My slides are available here. In fact, I also had time to repeat my presentation of the drum pattern paper.
Both parts of the talk led to some really interesting questions from the audience. My main connections here are Igor Vatolkin, and more generally the guys in the Special Interest Group on Music Analysis (SIGMA).

Chordroid demo

Matthias Mauch — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 11:11:08 +0000

I’m currently at the ISMIR conference in Porto, Portugal. Very nice conference â€” and I’m hoping to contribute to that some more by presenting Sam Myer’s “Chordroid” real-time chord detection tool, which works on Android devices. In fact, I’ve actually organised a guitar. The demonstration is going to happen this afternoon in the infamous “Maus Habitos” bar, so the atmosphere should be friendly…

My ISMIR 2012 Talk on Rhythm Patterns

Matthias Mauch — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 16:32:37 +0000

It was fun to present the work I did with Simon to the people at ISMIR. Some people seemed to have liked it, so thanks for that. This video is a test run of the presentation I did last night, so for those of you who weren’t there [edit: at the conference, I mean] and want to have a look, please do.

Of course, I also recommend you go to the ndrum website to check out rhythm rankings more explanations, and the paper. Well, you can also have that here.

A Corpus-based Study of Rhythm Patterns

Matthias Mauch — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 16:37:28 +0000

Something new, and, at least to me, exciting. And: it’s not about chords this time, can you believe it?

Accompanying web page is here.

Abstract: We present a corpus-based study of musical rhythm, based on a collection of 4.8 million bar-length drum patterns extracted from 48,176 pieces of symbolic music. Approaches to the analysis of rhythm in music information retrieval to date have focussed on low-level features for retrieval or on the detection of tempo, beats and drums in audio recordings. Musicological approaches are usually concerned with the description or implementation of manmade music theories. In this paper, we present a quantitative bottom-up approach to the study of rhythm that relies upon well-understood statistical methods from natural language processing. We adapt these methods to our corpus of music, based on the realisation thatâ€”unlike wordsâ€”bar length drum patterns can be systematically decomposed into sub-patterns both in time and by instrument. We show that, in some respects, our rhythm corpus behaves like natural language corpora, particularly in the sparsity of vocabulary. The same methods that detect word collocations allow us to quantify and rank idiomatic combinations of drum patterns. In other respects, our corpus has properties absent from language corpora, in particular, the high amount of repetition and strong mutual information rates between drum instruments. Our findings may be of direct interest to musicians and musicologists, and can inform the design of ground truth corpora and computational models of musical rhythm.

Songle with SoundCloud content

Matthias Mauch — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 18:13:56 +0000

Our Songle.jp web service for interactive music analysis and annotation can now analyse and playback PIAPRO and SoundCloud content. This great new development from my old research group around Masataka Goto at AIST in Japan means that the number of interesting music tracks that are supported has multiplied. Previously the system relied on content that was stored in freely available and directly linked audio files, so in practice the content was mainly low quality … and usually also Japanese.
Now, exciting new possibilities arise, and I’ve already registered a few new songs from SoundCloud, e.g. this version of Thriller.
You can log in to Songle using OpenID, or simply use your Twitter, Yahoo, or Google account. Once logged in, you can register a SoundCloud song URL on the Songle song registration site.

I’ll be on Radio 4

Matthias Mauch — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 16:25:45 +0000

… or so I’m told, in a programme about DarwinTunes and other music stuff involving evolution, it’s called Darwin’s Tunes. Ah, well, it should be interesting anyway, so set your alarm clocks for next Wednesday at 9 pm (British Summer Time)!