The behavior of users of music streaming services is investigated from the point of view of the temporal dimension of individual songs; specifically, the main object of the analysis is the point in time within a song at which users stop listening and start streaming another song ("skip"). The main contribution of this study is the ascertainment of a correlation between the distribution in time of skipping events and the musical structure of songs. It is also shown that such distribution is not only specific to the individual songs, but also independent of the cohort of users and, under stationary conditions, date of observation. Finally, user behavioral data is used to train a predictor of the musical structure of a song solely from its acoustic content; it is shown that the use of such data, available in large quantities to music streaming services, yields significant improvements in accuracy over the customary fashion of training this class of algorithms, in which only smaller amounts of hand-labeled data are available.
An alternative approach to deal with the aforementioned issues is the release of the algorithms themselves as open source software: MSAF @cite_4 is the leading effort in that regard within the Music Information Retrieval community, and couples that goal with an evaluation framework; the latter is in turn based on MIReval @cite_15 , a reference implementation of a large set of common music-specific IR evaluation metrics. The remainder of this paper makes use of the following algorithm implementations borrowed from MSAF : cnmf @cite_10 , foote @cite_2 , olda @cite_9 , scluster @cite_22 , sf @cite_19 . Furthermore, another reference algorithm is given by the The Echo Nest Analyzer, based on @cite_14 , whose results can be accessed through Spotify's public API.
@cite_14 @cite_4 @cite_22 @cite_9 @cite_19 @cite_2 @cite_15 @cite_10
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Central to the field of MIR research is the evaluation of algorithms used to extract information from music data. We present mir_eval, an open source software library which provides a transparent and easy-to-use implementation of the most common metrics used to measure the performance of MIR algorithms. In this paper, we enumerate the metrics implemented by mir_eval and quantitatively compare each to existing implementations. When the scores reported by mir_eval differ substantially from the reference, we detail the differences in implementation. We also provide a brief overview of mir_eval’s architecture, design, and intended use. 1. EVALUATING MIR ALGORITHMS Much of the research in Music Information Retrieval (MIR) involves the development of systems that process raw music data to produce semantic information. The goal of these systems is frequently defined as attempting to duplicate the performance of a human listener given the same task [5]. A natural way to determine a system’s effectiveness might be for a human to study the output produced by the system and judge its correctness. However, this would yield only subjective ratings, and would also be extremely timeconsuming when evaluating a system’s output over a large corpus of music. Instead, objective metrics are developed to provide a well-defined way of computing a score which indicates each system’s output’s correctness. These metrics typically involve a heuristically-motivated comparison of the system’s output to a reference which is known to be correct. Over time, certain metrics have become standard for each ∗Please direct correspondence to craffel@gmail.com c © Colin Raffel, Brian McFee, Eric J. Humphrey, Justin Salamon, Oriol Nieto, Dawen Liang, Daniel P. W. Ellis. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). Attribution: Colin Raffel, Brian McFee, Eric J. Humphrey, Justin Salamon, Oriol Nieto, Dawen Liang, Daniel P. W. Ellis. We present a simple and scalable algorithm for top-N recommendation able to deal with very large datasets and (binary rated) implicit feedback. We focus on memory-based collaborative filtering algorithms similar to the well known neighboor based technique for explicit feedback. The major difference, that makes the algorithm particularly scalable, is that it uses positive feedback only and no explicit computation of the complete (user-by-user or item-by-item) similarity matrix needs to be performed. The study of the proposed algorithm has been conducted on data from the Million Songs Dataset (MSD) challenge whose task was to suggest a set of songs (out of more than 380k available songs) to more than 100k users given half of the user listening history and complete listening history of other 1 million people. In particular, we investigate on the entire recommendation pipeline, starting from the definition of suitable similarity and scoring functions and suggestions on how to aggregate multiple ranking strategies to define the overall recommendation. The technique we are proposing extends and improves the one that already won the MSD challenge last year. This paper presents a method for recognizing musical instruments in user-generated videos. Musical instrument recognition from music signals is a well-known task in the music information retrieval (MIR) field, where current approaches rely on the analysis of the good-quality audio material. This work addresses a real-world scenario with several research challenges, i.e. the analysis of user-generated videos that are varied in terms of recording conditions and quality and may contain multiple instruments sounding simultaneously and background noise. Our approach does not only focus on the analysis of audio information, but we exploit the multimodal information embedded in the audio and visual domains. In order to do so, we develop a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture which combines learned representations from both modalities at a late fusion stage. Our approach is trained and evaluated on two large-scale video datasets: YouTube-8M and FCVID. The proposed architectures demonstrate state-of-the-art results in audio and video object recognition, provide additional robustness to missing modalities, and remains computationally cheap to train. We introduce a dataset for facilitating audio-visual analysis of music performances. The dataset comprises 44 simple multi-instrument classical music pieces assembled from coordinated but separately recorded performances of individual tracks. For each piece, we provide the musical score in MIDI format, the audio recordings of the individual tracks, the audio and video recording of the assembled mixture, and ground-truth annotation files including frame-level and note-level transcriptions. We describe our methodology for the creation of the dataset, particularly highlighting our approaches to address the challenges involved in maintaining synchronization and expressiveness. We demonstrate the high quality of synchronization achieved with our proposed approach by comparing the dataset with existing widely used music audio datasets. We anticipate that the dataset will be useful for the development and evaluation of existing music information retrieval (MIR) tasks, as well as for novel multimodal tasks. We benchmark two existing MIR tasks (multipitch analysis and score-informed source separation) on the dataset and compare them with other existing music audio datasets. In addition, we consider two novel multimodal MIR tasks (visually informed multipitch analysis and polyphonic vibrato analysis) enabled by the dataset and provide evaluation measurements and baseline systems for future comparisons (from our recent work). Finally, we propose several emerging research directions that the dataset enables.