Music genre classification has become increasingly critical with the advent of various streaming applications. Nowadays, we find it impossible to imagine using the artist's name and song title to search for music in a sophisticated music app. It is always difficult to classify music correctly because the information linked to music, such as region, artist, album, or non-album, is so variable. This paper presents a study on music genre classification using a combination of Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and Deep Learning (DL) techniques. A novel algorithm is proposed that utilizes both DSP and DL methods to extract relevant features from audio signals and classify them into various genres. The algorithm was tested on the GTZAN dataset and achieved high accuracy. An end-to-end deployment architecture is also proposed for integration into music-related applications. The performance of the algorithm is analyzed and future directions for improvement are discussed. The proposed DSP and DL-based music genre classification algorithm and deployment architecture demonstrate a promising approach for music genre classification.
A range of applications of multi-modal music information retrieval is centred around the problem of connecting large collections of sheet music (images) to corresponding audio recordings, that is, identifying pairs of audio and score excerpts that refer to the same musical content. One of the typical and most recent approaches to this task employs cross-modal deep learning architectures to learn joint embedding spaces that link the two distinct modalities - audio and sheet music images. While there has been steady improvement on this front over the past years, a number of open problems still prevent large-scale employment of this methodology. In this article we attempt to provide an insightful examination of the current developments on audio-sheet music retrieval via deep learning methods. We first identify a set of main challenges on the road towards robust and large-scale cross-modal music retrieval in real scenarios. We then highlight the steps we have taken so far to address some of these challenges, documenting step-by-step improvement along several dimensions. We conclude by analysing the remaining challenges and present ideas for solving these, in order to pave the way to a unified and robust methodology for cross-modal music retrieval.
Existing work has revealed that large-scale offline evaluation of recommender systems for user-item interactions is prone to bias caused by the deployed system itself, as a form of closed loop feedback. Many adopt the \textit{propensity} concept to analyze or mitigate this empirical issue. In this work, we extend the analysis to session-based setup and adapted propensity calculation to the unique characteristics of session-based recommendation tasks. Our experiments incorporate neural models and KNN-based models, and cover both the music and the e-commerce domain. We study the distributions of propensity and different stratification techniques on different datasets and find that propensity-related traits are actually dataset-specific. We then leverage the effect of stratification and achieve promising results compared to the original models.
The research in the field of music is rapidly growing, and this trend emphasizes the need for comprehensive data. Though researchers have made an effort to contribute their own datasets, many data collections lack the requisite inclusivity for comprehensive study because they are frequently focused on particular components of music or other specific topics. We have endeavored to address data scarcity by employing an instrument-based approach to provide a complete corpus related to the Persian piano. Our piano corpus includes relevant labels for Persian music mode (Dastgah) and comprehensive metadata, allowing for utilization in various popular research areas. The features extracted from 2022 Persian piano pieces in The Persian Piano Corpus (PPC) have been collected and made available to researchers, aiming for a more thorough understanding of Persian music and the role of the piano in it in subsequent steps.
Linking sheet music images to audio recordings remains a key problem for the development of efficient cross-modal music retrieval systems. One of the fundamental approaches toward this task is to learn a cross-modal embedding space via deep neural networks that is able to connect short snippets of audio and sheet music. However, the scarcity of annotated data from real musical content affects the capability of such methods to generalize to real retrieval scenarios. In this work, we investigate whether we can mitigate this limitation with self-supervised contrastive learning, by exposing a network to a large amount of real music data as a pre-training step, by contrasting randomly augmented views of snippets of both modalities, namely audio and sheet images. Through a number of experiments on synthetic and real piano data, we show that pre-trained models are able to retrieve snippets with better precision in all scenarios and pre-training configurations. Encouraged by these results, we employ the snippet embeddings in the higher-level task of cross-modal piece identification and conduct more experiments on several retrieval configurations. In this task, we observe that the retrieval quality improves from 30% up to 100% when real music data is present. We then conclude by arguing for the potential of self-supervised contrastive learning for alleviating the annotated data scarcity in multi-modal music retrieval models.
In recent years, there has been a growing emphasis on the intersection of audio, vision, and text modalities, driving forward the advancements in multimodal research. However, strong bias that exists in any modality can lead to the model neglecting the others. Consequently, the model's ability to effectively reason across these diverse modalities is compromised, impeding further advancement. In this paper, we meticulously review each question type from the original dataset, selecting those with pronounced answer biases. To counter these biases, we gather complementary videos and questions, ensuring that no answers have outstanding skewed distribution. In particular, for binary questions, we strive to ensure that both answers are almost uniformly spread within each question category. As a result, we construct a new dataset, named MUSIC-AVQA v2.0, which is more challenging and we believe could better foster the progress of AVQA task. Furthermore, we present a novel baseline model that delves deeper into the audio-visual-text interrelation. On MUSIC-AVQA v2.0, this model surpasses all the existing benchmarks, improving accuracy by 2% on MUSIC-AVQA v2.0, setting a new state-of-the-art performance.
In this work, we propose a novel research problem: assessing positive and risky messages from music products. We first establish a benchmark for multi-angle multi-level music content assessment and then present an effective multi-task prediction model with ordinality-enforcement to solve this problem. Our result shows the proposed method not only significantly outperforms strong task-specific counterparts but can concurrently evaluate multiple aspects.
This paper delves into the intersection of computational theory and music, examining the concept of undecidability and its significant, yet overlooked, implications within the realm of modern music composition and production. It posits that undecidability, a principle traditionally associated with theoretical computer science, extends its relevance to the music industry. The study adopts a multidimensional approach, focusing on five key areas: (1) the Turing completeness of Ableton, a widely used digital audio workstation, (2) the undecidability of satisfiability in sound creation utilizing an array of effects, (3) the undecidability of constraints on polymeters in musical compositions, (4) the undecidability of satisfiability in just intonation harmony constraints, and (5) the undecidability of "new ordering systems". In addition to providing theoretical proof for these assertions, the paper elucidates the practical relevance of these concepts for practitioners outside the field of theoretical computer science. The ultimate aim is to foster a new understanding of undecidability in music, highlighting its broader applicability and potential to influence contemporary computer-assisted (and traditional) music making.
Query-by-Humming (QbH) is a task that involves finding the most relevant song based on a hummed or sung fragment. Despite recent successful commercial solutions, implementing QbH systems remains challenging due to the lack of high-quality datasets for training machine learning models. In this paper, we propose a deep learning data collection technique and introduce Covers and Hummings Aligned Dataset (CHAD), a novel dataset that contains 18 hours of short music fragments, paired with time-aligned hummed versions. To expand our dataset, we employ a semi-supervised model training pipeline that leverages the QbH task as a specialized case of cover song identification (CSI) task. Starting with a model trained on the initial dataset, we iteratively collect groups of fragments of cover versions of the same song and retrain the model on the extended data. Using this pipeline, we collect over 308 hours of additional music fragments, paired with time-aligned cover versions. The final model is successfully applied to the QbH task and achieves competitive results on benchmark datasets. Our study shows that the proposed dataset and training pipeline can effectively facilitate the implementation of QbH systems.
Audio fingerprinting is a well-established solution for song identification from short recording excerpts. Popular methods rely on the extraction of sparse representations, generally spectral peaks, and have proven to be accurate, fast, and scalable to large collections. However, real-world applications of audio identification often happen in noisy environments, which can cause these systems to fail. In this work, we tackle this problem by introducing and releasing a new audio augmentation pipeline that adds noise to music snippets in a realistic way, by stochastically mimicking real-world scenarios. We then propose and release a deep learning model that removes noisy components from spectrograms in order to improve peak-based fingerprinting systems' accuracy. We show that the addition of our model improves the identification performance of commonly used audio fingerprinting systems, even under noisy conditions.