Olmo Cornelis

On the suitability of state-of-the-art music information retrieval methods for analyzing, categorizing and accessing non-Western and ethnic music collections

With increasing amounts of music being available in digital form, research in music information retrieval has turned into a dominant field to support organization of and easy access to large collections of music. Yet, most research is focussed traditionally on Western music, mostly in the form of mastered studio recordings. This leaves the question whether current music information retrieval approaches can also be applied to collections of non-Western and in particular ethnic music with completely different characteristics and requirements. In this work we analyze the performance of a range of automatic audio description algorithms on three music databases with distinct characteristics, specifically a Western music collection used previously in research benchmarks, a collection of Latin American music with roots in Latin American culture, but following Western tonality principles, as well as a collection of field recordings of ethnic African music. The study quantitatively shows the advantages and shortcomings of different feature representations extracted from music on the basis of classification tasks, and presents an approach to visualize, access and interact with ethnic music collections in a structured way.

Access to ethnic music: Advances and perspectives in content-based music information retrieval

Access to digital music collections is nowadays facilitated by content-based methods that allow the retrieval of music on the basis of intrinsic properties of audio, in addition to advanced metadata processing. However, access to ethnic music remains problematic, as this music does not always correspond to the Western concepts that underlie the currently available content-based methods. In this paper, we examine the literature on access to ethnic music, while focusing on the reasons why the existing techniques fail or fall short of expectations and what can be done about it. The paper considers a review of the work on signals and feature extraction, on symbolic and semantic information processing, and on metadata and context tools. An overview is given of several European ethnic music archives and related ongoing research projects. Problems are highlighted and suggestions of the ways in which to improve access to ethnic music collections are given.

Tarsos, a Modular Platform for precise Pitch Analysis of Western and non-Western music

Abstract This paper presents Tarsos, a modular software platform used to extract and analyse 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 analyse deviations in Western music, or to analyse 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.

Evaluation and Recommendation of Pulse and Tempo Annotation in Ethnic Music

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 analyse 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 analyse 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.