arXiv subjects

Gerhard Widmer

Publications and source records attributed to Gerhard Widmer.

170 records · Page 10Linked to original sources

arXiv2016

Towards End-to-End Audio-Sheet-Music Retrieval

This paper demonstrates the feasibility of learning to retrieve short snippets of sheet music (images) when given a short query excerpt of music (audio) -- and vice versa --, without any symbolic representation of music or scores. This would be highly useful in many content-based musical retrieval scenarios. Our approach is based on Deep Canonical Correlation Analysis (DCCA) and learns correlated latent spaces allowing for cross-modality retrieval in both directions. Initial experiments with relatively simple monophonic music show promising results.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2016

Live Score Following on Sheet Music Images

In this demo we show a novel approach to score following. Instead of relying on some symbolic representation, we are using a multi-modal convolutional neural network to match the incoming audio stream directly to sheet music images. This approach is in an early stage and should be seen as proof of concept. Nonetheless, the audience will have the opportunity to test our implementation themselves via 3 simple piano pieces.

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arXiv2016

On the Potential of Simple Framewise Approaches to Piano Transcription

In an attempt at exploring the limitations of simple approaches to the task of piano transcription (as usually defined in MIR), we conduct an in-depth analysis of neural network-based framewise transcription. We systematically compare different popular input representations for transcription systems to determine the ones most suitable for use with neural networks. Exploiting recent advances in training techniques and new regularizers, and taking into account hyper-parameter tuning, we show that it is possible, by simple bottom-up frame-wise processing, to obtain a piano transcriber that outperforms the current published state of the art on the publicly available MAPS dataset -- without any complex post-processing steps. Thus, we propose this simple approach as a new baseline for this dataset, for future transcription research to build on and improve.

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arXiv2016

A Fully Convolutional Deep Auditory Model for Musical Chord Recognition

Chord recognition systems depend on robust feature extraction pipelines. While these pipelines are traditionally hand-crafted, recent advances in end-to-end machine learning have begun to inspire researchers to explore data-driven methods for such tasks. In this paper, we present a chord recognition system that uses a fully convolutional deep auditory model for feature extraction. The extracted features are processed by a Conditional Random Field that decodes the final chord sequence. Both processing stages are trained automatically and do not require expert knowledge for optimising parameters. We show that the learned auditory system extracts musically interpretable features, and that the proposed chord recognition system achieves results on par or better than state-of-the-art algorithms.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2016

Towards computer-assisted understanding of dynamics in symphonic music

Many people enjoy classical symphonic music. Its diverse instrumentation makes for a rich listening experience. This diversity adds to the conductor's expressive freedom to shape the sound according to their imagination. As a result, the same piece may sound quite differently from one conductor to another. Differences in interpretation may be noticeable subjectively to listeners, but they are sometimes hard to pinpoint, presumably because of the acoustic complexity of the sound. We describe a computational model that interprets dynamics---expressive loudness variations in performances---in terms of the musical score, highlighting differences between performances of the same piece. We demonstrate experimentally that the model has predictive power, and give examples of conductor ideosyncrasies found by using the model as an explanatory tool. Although the present model is still in active development, it may pave the road for a consumer-oriented companion to interactive classical music understanding.

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arXiv2016

Getting Closer to the Essence of Music: The Con Espressione Manifesto

This text offers a personal and very subjective view on the current situation of Music Information Research (MIR). Motivated by the desire to build systems with a somewhat deeper understanding of music than the ones we currently have, I try to sketch a number of challenges for the next decade of MIR research, grouped around six simple truths about music that are probably generally agreed on, but often ignored in everyday research.

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arXiv2016

madmom: a new Python Audio and Music Signal Processing Library

In this paper, we present madmom, an open-source audio processing and music information retrieval (MIR) library written in Python. madmom features a concise, NumPy-compatible, object oriented design with simple calling conventions and sensible default values for all parameters, which facilitates fast prototyping of MIR applications. Prototypes can be seamlessly converted into callable processing pipelines through madmom's concept of Processors, callable objects that run transparently on multiple cores. Processors can also be serialised, saved, and re-run to allow results to be easily reproduced anywhere. Apart from low-level audio processing, madmom puts emphasis on musically meaningful high-level features. Many of these incorporate machine learning techniques and madmom provides a module that implements some in MIR commonly used methods such as hidden Markov models and neural networks. Additionally, madmom comes with several state-of-the-art MIR algorithms for onset detection, beat, downbeat and meter tracking, tempo estimation, and piano transcription. These can easily be incorporated into bigger MIR systems or run as stand-alone programs.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2016

Deep Linear Discriminant Analysis

We introduce Deep Linear Discriminant Analysis (DeepLDA) which learns linearly separable latent representations in an end-to-end fashion. Classic LDA extracts features which preserve class separability and is used for dimensionality reduction for many classification problems. The central idea of this paper is to put LDA on top of a deep neural network. This can be seen as a non-linear extension of classic LDA. Instead of maximizing the likelihood of target labels for individual samples, we propose an objective function that pushes the network to produce feature distributions which: (a) have low variance within the same class and (b) high variance between different classes. Our objective is derived from the general LDA eigenvalue problem and still allows to train with stochastic gradient descent and back-propagation. For evaluation we test our approach on three different benchmark datasets (MNIST, CIFAR-10 and STL-10). DeepLDA produces competitive results on MNIST and CIFAR-10 and outperforms a network trained with categorical cross entropy (same architecture) on a supervised setting of STL-10.

cs.LG↗