Category Archives: software

LifeSoundTrack: música, tecnología, recuerdos y alzheimer / music, technology, memories and alzheimer

English version below!

A veces los proyectos más enriquecedores son los que realizas con menos recursos.

En éste proyecto utilizamos las tecnologías de recuperación de la información musical para encontrar la banda sonora de la vida de personas mayores españolas. Ésto ha presentado varios retos de investigación y tecnológicos. En concreto hemos podido observar el sesgo de los sistemas actuales de recomendación musical tanto en que sólo se centran en un repertorio musical popular y sus interfaces y descriptores musicales están pensados para usuarios jóvenes. Esto aplica a:

  • Las taxonomías de géneros musicales.
  • Los idiomas predominantes en las canciones y su etiquetado.
  • Los descriptores y playlists que se utilizan (e.g. música de fiesta).
  • La dificultad para tener los derechos de dar una canción a éstas personas para que la escuchen.
  • La dificultad de tener dispositivos fáciles de usar y dirigidos a éste tipo de personas.

Por tanto casi hemos tenido que empezar desde cero! Éste es el repositorio github que hemos creado (abierto): https://github.com/MTG/lifesoundtrack

Y si alguien quiere obtener su banda sonora puede hacerlo en bandasonoravital.upf.edu 

Atención! El sistema está pensado para personas mayores que han nacido o viven en España, por lo que utilizadlo sobre todo si cumplís éstos requisitos o para alguna persona que conozcáis que los cumpla.

Ha sido un privilegio poder colaborar con la Fundación Pasqual Maragall, La Fundación AVAN y la Escuela La Salud de Sabadell en éste piloto con personas que padecen la enfermedad de Alzheimer. Sobre todo ha sido genial trabajar con Nina, Anna, Carolina, y los chicos de La Salut. Aquí podéis ver un vídeo que me encanta y resume muy bien el proyecto:

Para más información no os perdáis el documental Sense Ficció que emitirá TV3 el día 8 de Mayo por la noche!!!

Más información del proyecto en la web del MTG y de la Fundación Pasqual Maragall.

Y las bandas sonoras se pueden generar en http://bandasonoravital.upf.edu/ 

¡Gracias a todo el equipo! En especial al grupo del MTG: Perfe Herrera, Felipe Navarro, Olga Slizovskaia, por su tiempo en éste proyecto donde no hemos tenido financiación específica.

auriculares

Sometimes the most enriching projects are those that you do with less resources and funding.

In this project we use music information retrieval (MIR) technologies to find the life soundtrack of Spanish elderly people. Starting from a questionnaire where we ask about biographical information and one´s relationship with music, we build a playlist looking at several sources such as spotify or youtube. 

This has presented several research and technological challenges. Specifically, we have been able to observe the bias of current music recommendation systems, as they focus on a popular musical repertoire and their interfaces and musical descriptors are designed for young users. This applies to:

  • The taxonomies of musical genres.
  • The predominant languages ​​in the songs and their labeling.
  • The descriptors and playlists that are used (e.g., what does happy music mean).
  • The difficulty to have the rights to give a song to these people to be heard.
  • The difficulty of having easy-to-use devices aimed at this type of person.

Therefore we almost had to start from scratch! This is the github repository that we have created (open): https://github.com/MTG/lifesoundtrack 

And if someone wants to get their soundtrack you can do it at bandasonoravital.upf.edu
Attention! The system is designed for seniors who have been born or live in Spain, so use it especially if you meet these requirements or for someone you know who complies.

It has been a privilege to be able to collaborate with the Pasqual Maragall Foundation, the AVAN Foundation and the Health School of Sabadell in this pilot with people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Above all it has been great to work with Nina, Anna, Carolina, and the guys from La Salut. Here you can see a video that I love and sums up the project very well:

For more information, do not miss the Sense Ficció documentary that will broadcast TV3 on May 8 at night !!!

More information on the project on the MTG website and the Pasqual Maragall Foundation. Thanks to all the team! Especially to the MTG group: Perfe Herrera, Felipe Navarro, Olga Slizovskaia, for their time in this project where we have not had specific funding.

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CANTE: Open Algorithm, Code & Data for the Automatic Transcription of Flamenco Singing

Over the last months, several journal publications related to our research on flamenco & technology are finally online.

One of them is a work with my former PhD student, Nadine Kroher (who now moved to Universidad de Sevilla), on the automatic transcription of flamenco singing. Flamenco singing is really challenging in terms of computational modelling, given its ornamented character and variety, and we have designed a system for its automatic transcription, focusing on polyphonic recordings.

flamencoTranscriptionKroherGomez

The proposed system outperforms state of the art singing transcription systems with respect to voicing accuracy, onset detection, and overall performance when evaluated on flamenco singing datasets. We hope it think will be a contribution not only to flamenco research but to other singing styles.

You can read about our algorithm at the paper we published at IEEE TASP, where we present the method, strategies for evaluation and comparison with state of the art approaches. You can not only read, but actually try it, as we published an open source software for the algorithm, plus a music dataset for its comparative evaluation, cante2midi (I will talk about flamenco corpus in another post). All of this to foster research reproducibility and motivate people to work on flamenco music.

¡Olé!

 

 

 

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Paper & Matlab framework for hierarchical multi-scale set-class analysis

Journal on Mathematics and Music

As part of his recent PhD thesis, Agustín Martorell has studied the potential of multi-scale representations in music analysis. In particular, he focuses on the description of tonality from score representations and on the analysis of pitch-class sets.  We have recently published the results of this study  in Journal of Mathematics and Music: Mathematical and Computational Approaches to Music Theory, Analysis, Composition and Performance. The paper is now online!

Several analyses are discussed within the paper while addressing the problem of visualization. As a result of the work, there is also a MATLAB Toolbox that you are able to download from here.

Agustín Martorell & Emilia Gómez

Abstract

This work presents a systematic methodology for set-class surface analysis using temporal multi-scale techniques. The method extracts the set-class content of all the possible temporal segments, addressing the representational problems derived from the massive overlapping of segments. A time versus time-scale representation, named class-scape, provides a global hierarchical overview of the class content in the piece, and it serves as a visual index for interactive inspection. Additional data structures summarize the set-class inclusion relations over time and quantify the class and subclass content in pieces or collections, helping to decide about sets of analytical interest. Case studies include the comparative subclass characterization of diatonicism in Victoria’s masses (in Ionian mode) and Bach’s preludes and fugues (in major mode), as well as the structural analysis of Webern’s Variations for piano op. 27, under different class-equivalences.

 

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