Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been successfully used in various Music Information Retrieval (MIR) tasks, both as end-to-end models and as feature extractors for more complex systems. However, the MIR field is still dominated by the classical VGG-based CNN architecture variants, often in combination with more complex modules such as attention, and/or techniques such as pre-training on large datasets. Deeper models such as ResNet -- which surpassed VGG by a large margin in other domains -- are rarely used in MIR. One of the main reasons for this, as we will show, is the lack of generalization of deeper CNNs in the music domain. In this paper, we present a principled way to make deep architectures like ResNet competitive for music-related tasks, based on well-designed regularization strategies. In particular, we analyze the recently introduced Receptive-Field Regularization and Shake-Shake, and show that they significantly improve the generalization of deep CNNs on music-related tasks, and that the resulting deep CNNs can outperform current more complex models such as CNNs augmented with pre-training and attention. We demonstrate this on two different MIR tasks and two corresponding datasets, thus offering our deep regularized CNNs as a new baseline for these datasets, which can also be used as a feature-extracting module in future, more complex approaches.
Analogy-making is a key method for computer algorithms to generate both natural and creative music pieces. In general, an analogy is made by partially transferring the music abstractions, i.e., high-level representations and their relationships, from one piece to another; however, this procedure requires disentangling music representations, which usually takes little effort for musicians but is non-trivial for computers. Three sub-problems arise: extracting latent representations from the observation, disentangling the representations so that each part has a unique semantic interpretation, and mapping the latent representations back to actual music. In this paper, we contribute an explicitly-constrained variational autoencoder (EC$^2$-VAE) as a unified solution to all three sub-problems. We focus on disentangling the pitch and rhythm representations of 8-beat music clips conditioned on chords. In producing music analogies, this model helps us to realize the imaginary situation of "what if" a piece is composed using a different pitch contour, rhythm pattern, or chord progression by borrowing the representations from other pieces. Finally, we validate the proposed disentanglement method using objective measurements and evaluate the analogy examples by a subjective study.
Modern digital music production typically involves combining numerous acoustic elements to compile a piece of music. Important types of such elements are drum samples, which determine the characteristics of the percussive components of the piece. Artists must use their aesthetic judgement to assess whether a given drum sample fits the current musical context. However, selecting drum samples from a potentially large library is tedious and may interrupt the creative flow. In this work, we explore the automatic drum sample retrieval based on aesthetic principles learned from data. As a result, artists can rank the samples in their library by fit to some musical context at different stages of the production process (i.e., by fit to incomplete song mixtures). To this end, we use contrastive learning to maximize the score of drum samples originating from the same song as the mixture. We conduct a listening test to determine whether the human ratings match the automatic scoring function. We also perform objective quantitative analyses to evaluate the efficacy of our approach.
Music-to-dance translation is a brand-new and powerful feature in recent role-playing games. Players can now let their characters dance along with specified music clips and even generate fan-made dance videos. Previous works of this topic consider music-to-dance as a supervised motion generation problem based on time-series data. However, these methods suffer from limited training data pairs and the degradation of movements. This paper provides a new perspective for this task where we re-formulate the translation problem as a piece-wise dance phrase retrieval problem based on the choreography theory. With such a design, players are allowed to further edit the dance movements on top of our generation while other regression based methods ignore such user interactivity. Considering that the dance motion capture is an expensive and time-consuming procedure which requires the assistance of professional dancers, we train our method under a semi-supervised learning framework with a large unlabeled dataset (20x than labeled data) collected. A co-ascent mechanism is introduced to improve the robustness of our network. Using this unlabeled dataset, we also introduce self-supervised pre-training so that the translator can understand the melody, rhythm, and other components of music phrases. We show that the pre-training significantly improves the translation accuracy than that of training from scratch. Experimental results suggest that our method not only generalizes well over various styles of music but also succeeds in expert-level choreography for game players.
As the field of Music Information Retrieval grows, it is important to take into consideration the multi-modality of music and how aspects of musical engagement such as movement and gesture might be taken into account. Bodily movement is universally associated with music and reflective of important individual features related to music preference such as personality, mood, and empathy. Future multimodal MIR systems may benefit from taking these aspects into account. The current study addresses this by identifying individual differences, specifically Big Five personality traits, and scores on the Empathy and Systemizing Quotients (EQ/SQ) from participants' free dance movements. Our model successfully explored the unseen space for personality as well as EQ, SQ, which has not previously been accomplished for the latter. R2 scores for personality, EQ, and SQ were 76.3%, 77.1%, and 86.7% respectively. As a follow-up, we investigated which bodily joints were most important in defining these traits. We discuss how further research may explore how the mapping of these traits to movement patterns can be used to build a more personalized, multi-modal recommendation system, as well as potential therapeutic applications.
We propose a novel approach for the generation of polyphonic music based on LSTMs. We generate music in two steps. First, a chord LSTM predicts a chord progression based on a chord embedding. A second LSTM then generates polyphonic music from the predicted chord progression. The generated music sounds pleasing and harmonic, with only few dissonant notes. It has clear long-term structure that is similar to what a musician would play during a jam session. We show that our approach is sensible from a music theory perspective by evaluating the learned chord embeddings. Surprisingly, our simple model managed to extract the circle of fifths, an important tool in music theory, from the dataset.
Popular music streaming platforms offer users a diverse network of content exploration through a triad of affordances: organic, algorithmic and editorial access modes. Whilst offering great potential for discovery, such platform developments also pose the modern user with daily adoption decisions on two fronts: platform affordance adoption and the adoption of recommendations therein. Following a carefully constrained set of Deezer users over a 2-year observation period, our work explores factors driving user behaviour in the broad sense, by differentiating users on the basis of their temporal daily usage, adoption of the main platform affordances, and the ways in which they react to them, especially in terms of recommendation adoption. Diverging from a perspective common in studies on the effects of recommendation, we assume and confirm that users exhibit very diverse behaviours in using and adopting the platform affordances. The resulting complex and quite heterogeneous picture demonstrates that there is no blanket answer for adoption practices of both recommendation features and recommendations.
Music streaming services heavily rely on recommender systems to improve their users' experience, by helping them navigate through a large musical catalog and discover new songs, albums or artists. However, recommending relevant and personalized content to new users, with few to no interactions with the catalog, is challenging. This is commonly referred to as the user cold start problem. In this applied paper, we present the system recently deployed on the music streaming service Deezer to address this problem. The solution leverages a semi-personalized recommendation strategy, based on a deep neural network architecture and on a clustering of users from heterogeneous sources of information. We extensively show the practical impact of this system and its effectiveness at predicting the future musical preferences of cold start users on Deezer, through both offline and online large-scale experiments. Besides, we publicly release our code as well as anonymized usage data from our experiments. We hope that this release of industrial resources will benefit future research on user cold start recommendation.
This paper proposes a framework which is able to generate a sequence of three-dimensional human dance poses for a given music. The proposed framework consists of three components: a music feature encoder, a pose generator, and a music genre classifier. We focus on integrating these components for generating a realistic 3D human dancing move from music, which can be applied to artificial agents and humanoid robots. The trained dance pose generator, which is a generative autoregressive model, is able to synthesize a dance sequence longer than 5,000 pose frames. Experimental results of generated dance sequences from various songs show how the proposed method generates human-like dancing move to a given music. In addition, a generated 3D dance sequence is applied to a humanoid robot, showing that the proposed framework can make a robot to dance just by listening to music.