24 accepted papers
In this study, we explore how pianists can customize Music Minus One (MMO) concerto accompaniments to match their playing style. Bypassing the need for a symbolic score, often not available digitally, we use three types of audio data: solo piano recordings, MMO orchestra-only recordings, and mixed r…
Generating multi-instrument music from symbolic music representations is an important task in Music Information Retrieval (MIR). A central but still largely unsolved problem in this context is musically and acoustically informed control in the generation process. As the main contribution of this wor…
In computer vision and audio processing, soft dynamic time warping (SDTW) techniques have been used as a differentiable loss function to train deep neural networks (DNNs) on weakly aligned data. In existing SDTW algorithms, the horizontal, vertical, and diagonal alignment steps all have the same wei…
In recent years, the quality of text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis vastly improved due to deep-learning techniques, with parallel architectures, in particular, providing excellent synthesis quality at fast inference. Training these models usually requires speech recordings, corresponding phoneme-level t…
Many tasks in music information retrieval (MIR) involve weakly aligned data, where exact temporal correspondences are unknown. The connectionist temporal classification (CTC) loss is a standard technique to learn feature representations based on weakly aligned training data. However, CTC is limited…
Pitch estimation of a target musical source within a multi-source polyphonic signal is of great interest for music performance analysis. One possible approach for extracting the pitch of a target source is to first perform source separation and then estimate the pitch of the separated track. However…
Traditionally, work on singing voice detection has focused on identifying singing activity in music recordings. In this work, our aim is to extend this task towards simultaneously detecting the presence of singing voice as well as determining singer gender and voice type. We describe and compare fou…
Over the last decades, various conceptually different approaches for fundamental frequency (F0) estimation in monophonic audio recordings have been developed. The algorithms’ performances vary depending on the acoustical and musical properties of the input audio signal. A common strategy to assess t…
While global key and chord estimation for both popular and classical music recordings have received a lot of attention, little research has been devoted to estimating the local key for classical music. In this work, we approach local key estimation on a unique cross-version dataset comprising nine p…
In this paper, we consider a cross-modal retrieval scenario of Western classical music. Given a short monophonic musical theme in symbolic notation as query, the objective is to find relevant audio recordings in a database. A major challenge of this retrieval task is the possible difference in the d…
In this paper, we evaluate hand-crafted features as well as features learned from data using a convolutional neural network (CNN) for different fundamental frequency classification tasks. We compare classification based on full (variable-length) contours and classification based on fixed-sized subco…
Chords and their progressions are an important aspect of Western tonal music. Specifically, transitions between subsequent chords within a piece carry style-relevant information. To extract such information from audio recordings, a naive approach first peforms automatic chord estimation for computin…
This paper addresses the separation of drums from music recordings, a task closely related to harmonic-percussive source separation (HPSS). In previous works, two families of algorithms have been prominently applied to this problem. They are based either on local filtering and diffusion schemes, or…
Retrieving short monophonic queries in music recordings is a challenging research problem in Music Information Retrieval (MIR). In jazz music, given a solo transcription, one retrieval task is to find the corresponding (potentially polyphonic) recording in a music collection. Many conventional syste…
Harmonic-percussive-residual (HPR) sound separation is a useful preprocessing tool for applications such as pitched instrument transcription or rhythm extraction. Recent methods rely on the observation that in a spectrogram representation, harmonic sounds lead to horizontal structures and percussive…
Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) is an established method for finding a global alignment between two feature sequences. However, having a computational complexity that is quadratic in the input length, memory consumption becomes a major issue when dealing with long feature sequences. Various strategies ha…
In 1948, Barlow and Morgenstern released a collection of about 10,000 themes of well-known instrumental pieces from the corpus of Western Classical music [1]. These monophonic themes (usually four bars long) are often the most memorable parts of a piece of music. In this paper, we report on a system…
The goal of music alignment methods is to temporally align different versions of the same piece of music. These methods are typically evaluated by comparing the computed alignments to given ground-truth annotations. Creating such annotations is usually very labor intensive. For many musical pieces,…
Audio thumbnailing, which aims at finding the most representative audio segment of a music recording, is an important task in music information retrieval. In general, the notion of a thumbnail is not well-defined and several musical parts may be good thumbnail candidates. For example, for popular mu…
The problem of extracting singing voice from music recordings has received increasing research interest in recent years. Many proposed decomposition techniques are based on one of the following two strategies. The first approach is to directly decompose a given music recording into one component for…
When recording a live musical performance, the different voices, such as the instrument groups or soloists of an orchestra, are typically recorded in the same room simultaneously, with at least one microphone assigned to each voice. However, it is difficult to acoustically shield the microphones. In…
In the year 1948, Barlow and Morgenstern published the book “A Dictionary of Musical Themes”, which contains 9803 important musical themes from the Western classical music literature. In this paper, we deal with the problem of automatically matching these themes to other digitally available sources.…
In music compositions, certain parts may be played in an improvisational style with a rather vague notion of tempo, while other parts are characterized by having a clearly perceivable tempo. Based on this observation, we introduce in this paper some novel audio features for capturing tempo-related i…
We propose a set of novel audio features for classifying the style of classical music. The features rely on statistical measures based on a chroma feature representation of the audio data and describe the tonal complexity of the music, independently from the orchestration or timbre of the music. To…