Archive
A MIR paper published on Nature (the Journal): “Measuring the Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music”
Really nice to see (and read) such an interesting Music Information Retrieval (MIR) study in such a prestigious journal as Nature. Congratulations to the authors!
In addition to that, this seems a clear sign that Music Information Retrieval is no “obscure” topic, and research work done in this field is taken seriously by the overall scientific community, finding its way into the most prestigious and relevant scientific journals in the world (and not only in the filed of MIR, Computer Science, Musicology, etc).
In fact, there’s at least another important milestone in the MIR field that shows exactly that: “Xavier Serra is awarded an ERC Advanced Grant“.
A Look at George Tzanetakis’ Innovations in Music Classification
A great article about George Tzanetakis‘ 10 year work on MIR and software development: A Look at George Tzanetakis’ Innovations in Music Classification.
I feel really lucky (and proud) to know George since the early days of Marsyas (around 2003) and then to actually meet him in person here in Portugal some time later.
I ended up doing 3 research interships under his supervision at the University of Victoria, BC, Canada, during my PhD, and we currently keep a close collaboration in the scope of Marsyas and a R&D project on the topic of CASA (Computational Auditory Scene Analysis).
Congratulations George! And keep up with the good work! 🙂
The Changing Sound of Music: Approaches to Studying Recorded Musical Performances
Interesting notes about the (not always obvious) differences in recorded music that may have a significant impact on MIR.
Music Datasets for MIR
Publicly available music datasets are like gold mines for anyone working in MIR. And such datasets become diamonds if their audio data comes annotated with some sort of metadata (the more the better).
One of the most recent newcomers in this field is the great Magnatagatune dataset, but many others exist (many coming from the MIREX initiatives over the years) – check this site for a quite extensive compilation of the datasets available and used in MIR.
Anyway, I was wandering some of the music uploading sites available nowadays, mainly the ones with a CC license blanket, and I found at least four that may be usable as sources of audio data+metadata for MIR evaluations.
Free Music Archive (FMA) seems like a nice source of music for MIR research, where song uploads are selected by a limited number of “curators” (should we expect a “higher quality” selection of the songs?!). Songs only seem to have a genre/subgenre tag (as far as I could understand) and I have not found any API to retrieve the songs and their genre tag in a programatic way…
CCMixter is a another source of music data, associated with the Creative Commons Initiative/Licensing, but it seems to lack any type of information about genres/subgenres of other musical metadata. However, some of the tracks provide (or point to) the individual source tracks (i.e. isolated vocals, isolated drum track, etc.) which could be really nice for source separation evaluations.
Palco Principal is a portuguese website for bands and musicians to upload their musical creations. Upon upload, each song can be tagged with genre (from an ID3 tags list), as well as with a list of instruments used, if there is a male/female singer, and a list of “main stream” influences (aka well-known, commercially released bands). Some of the songs can be downloaded for free after registration (which is also free), but is not clear what is the license used for these downloads… Not sure if there is currently an API for access to the songs/metadata, though.
Finally, just learned about the Libre.fm initiative, but I’m just waiting for an invite, so no comments till then.
Luis Gustavo Martins's Blog 