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.
Research on the topic has long been hindered by the lack of sizeable amounts of expert annotations -- the manual segmentations and labelings of recordings done by musically-competent individuals -- because of its time-consuming nature, coupled with the legal retrictions involved in to sharing copyrighted recordings. Initiatives such as the SALAMI dataset @cite_13 attempt to fill this need by providing a relatively large (several hundreds) source of annotations for recordings, many of which are in the public domain.
@cite_13
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This paper describes the design and creation of an unprecedentedly large database of over 2400 structural annotations of nearly 1400 musical recordings. The database is intended to be a test set for algorithms that will be used to analyze a much larger corpus of hundreds of thousands of recordings, as part of the Structural Analysis of Large Amounts of Musical Information (SALAMI) project. This paper describes the design goals of the database and the practical issues that were encountered during its creation. In particular, we discuss the selection of the recordings, the development of an annotation format and procedure that adapts work by Peeters and Deruty [10], and the management and execution of the project. We also summarize some of the properties of the resulting corpus of annotations, including average inter-annotator agreement. The widespread diffusion of portable devices capable of capturing high-quality multimedia data, together with the rapid proliferation of media sharing platforms, has determined an incredible growth of user-generated content available online. Since it is hard to strictly regulate this trend, illegal diffusion of copyrighted material is often likely to occur. This is the case of audio bootlegs, i.e., concerts illegally recorded and redistributed by fans. In this paper, we propose a bootleg detector, with the aim of disambiguating between: i) bootlegs unofficially recorded; ii) live concerts officially published; iii) studio recordings from officially released albums. The proposed method is based on audio feature analysis and machine learning techniques. We exploit a deep learning paradigm to extract highly characterizing features from audio excerpts, and a supervised classifier for detection. The method is validated against a dataset of nearly 500 songs, and results are compared to a state-of-the-art detector. The conducted experiments confirm the capability of deep learning techniques to outperform classic feature extraction approaches. Music is composed to be emotionally expressive, and emotional associations provide an especially natural domain for indexing and recommendation in today's vast digital music libraries. But such libraries require powerful automated tools, and the development of systems for automatic prediction of musical emotion presents a myriad challenges. The perceptual nature of musical emotion necessitates the collection of data from human subjects. The interpretation of emotion varies between listeners thus each clip needs to be annotated by a distribution of subjects. In addition, the sharing of large music content libraries for the development of such systems, even for academic research, presents complicated legal issues which vary by country. This work presents a new publicly available dataset for music emotion recognition research and a baseline system. In addressing the difficulties of emotion annotation we have turned to crowdsourcing, using Amazon Mechanical Turk, and have developed a two-stage procedure for filtering out poor quality workers. The dataset consists entirely of creative commons music from the Free Music Archive, which as the name suggests, can be shared freely without penalty. The final dataset contains 1000 songs, each annotated by a minimum of 10 subjects, which is larger than many currently available music emotion dataset. 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.