While prior work on context-based music recommendation focused on fixed set of contexts (e.g. walking, driving, jogging), we propose to use multiple sensors and external data sources to describe momentary (ephemeral) context in a rich way with a very large number of possible states (e.g. jogging fast along in downtown of Sydney under a heavy rain at night being tired and angry). With our approach, we address the problems which current approaches face: 1) a limited ability to infer context from missing or faulty sensor data; 2) an inability to use contextual information to support novel content discovery.
With improvements in smartphone technology, there is a lot of potential for using rich contextual information to improve recommendations, in particular considering that people prefer to listen to different music in different contexts @cite_11 @cite_7 @cite_15 . Among the first to propose a context-aware music recommendation system are @cite_5 . They used weather data (from sensors and external data sources), and user information, to predict the appropriate music genre, tempo, and mood. Music can also be recommended based on user's heart beat to bring its rate to a normal level @cite_17 ; activities detected automatically (e.g. running, walking, sleeping, working, studying, and shopping) @cite_2 ; driving style, road type, landscape, sleepiness, traffic conditions, mood, weather, natural phenomena @cite_9 ; and emotional state to help to transition to a desired state @cite_0 . Soundtracks have also been recommended for smartphone videos based on location (using GPS and compass data for orientation), and extra information from 3rd party services such as Foursquare @cite_10 .
@cite_11 @cite_7 @cite_9 @cite_0 @cite_2 @cite_5 @cite_15 @cite_10 @cite_17
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We present a system to automatically generate soundtracks for user-generated outdoor videos (UGV) based on concurrently captured contextual sensor information with mobile apps for the ACM Multimedia 2012 Google challenge: Automatic Music Video Generation. Our method addresses the use case of making "a video much more attractive for sharing by adding a matching soundtrack to it." Our system correlates viewable scene information from sensors with geographic contextual tags from OpenStreetMap. The co-occurance of geo-tags and mood tags are investigated from a set of categories of the web site Foursquare.com and a mapping from geo-tags to mood tags is obtained. Finally, a music retrieval component returns music based on matching mood tags. The experimental results show that our system can successfully create soundtracks that are related to the mood and situation of UGVs and therefore enhance the enjoyment of viewers. Our system sends only sensor data to a cloud service and is therefore bandwidth efficient since video data does not need to be transmitted for analysis. A common scenario considered in recommender systems is to predict a user's preferences on unseen items based on his her preferences on observed items. A major limitation of this scenario is that a user might be interested in different things each time when using the system, but there is no way to allow the user to actively alter or adjust the recommended results. To address this issue, we propose the idea of "query-based recommendation" that allows a user to specify his her search intention while exploring new items, thereby incorporating the concept of information retrieval into recommendation systems. Moreover, the idea is more desirable when the user intention can be expressed in different ways. Take music recommendation as an example: the proposed system allows a user to explore new song tracks by specifying either a track, an album, or an artist. To enable such heterogeneous queries in a recommender system, we present a novel technique called "Heterogeneous Preference Embedding" to encode user preference and query intention into low-dimensional vector spaces. Then, with simple search methods or similarity calculations, we can use the encoded representation of queries to generate recommendations. This method is fairly flexible and it is easy to add other types of information when available. Evaluations on three music listening datasets confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art matrix factorization and network embedding methods. In the Internet music scene, where recommendation technology is key for navigating huge collections, large market players enjoy a considerable advantage. Accessing a wider pool of user feedback leads to an increasingly more accurate analysis of user tastes, effectively creating a "rich get richer" effect. This work aims at significantly lowering the entry barrier for creating music recommenders, through a paradigm coupling a public data source and a new collaborative filtering (CF) model. We claim that Internet radio stations form a readily available resource of abundant fresh human signals on music through their playlists, which are essentially cohesive sets of related tracks. In a way, our models rely on the knowledge of a diverse group of experts in lieu of the commonly used wisdom of crowds. Over several weeks, we aggregated publicly available playlists of thousands of Internet radio stations, resulting in a dataset encompassing millions of plays, and hundreds of thousands of tracks and artists. This provides the large scale ground data necessary to mitigate the cold start problem of new items at both mature and emerging services. Furthermore, we developed a new probabilistic CF model, tailored to the Internet radio resource. The success of the model was empirically validated on the collected dataset. Moreover, we tested the model at a cross-source transfer learning manner -- the same model trained on the Internet radio data was used to predict behavior of Yahoo! Music users. This demonstrates the ability to tap the Internet radio signals in other music recommendation setups. Based on encouraging empirical results, our hope is that the proposed paradigm will make quality music recommendation accessible to all interested parties in the community. Contextual factors can greatly influence the users' preferences in listening to music. Although it is hard to capture these factors directly, it is possible to see their effects on the sequence of songs liked by the user in his her current interaction with the system. In this paper, we present a context-aware music recommender system which infers contextual information based on the most recent sequence of songs liked by the user. Our approach mines the top frequent tags for songs from social tagging Web sites and uses topic modeling to determine a set of latent topics for each song, representing different contexts. Using a database of human-compiled playlists, each playlist is mapped into a sequence of topics and frequent sequential patterns are discovered among these topics. These patterns represent frequent sequences of transitions between the latent topics representing contexts. Given a sequence of songs in a user's current interaction, the discovered patterns are used to predict the next topic in the playlist. The predicted topics are then used to post-filter the initial ranking produced by a traditional recommendation algorithm. Our experimental evaluation suggests that our system can help produce better recommendations in comparison to a conventional recommender system based on collaborative or content-based filtering. Furthermore, the topic modeling approach proposed here is also useful in providing better insight into the underlying reasons for song selection and in applications such as playlist construction and context prediction. Many of today's music streaming websites and apps provide personalized next-track listening recommendations based on the user's current and past listening behavior. In the research literature, various algorithmic approaches to determine suitable next tracks can be found. However, almost all of them were evaluated in offline experiments using, for example, manually created playlists as a gold standard. In this work, we aim to check the external validity of insights that are obtained through such offline experiments on historical datasets. We conducted an online user study involving 277 subjects in which the participants evaluated the suitability of four different alternatives of continuing a given set of playlists. Our results indicate that manually created playlists can in fact represent a reasonable gold standard, an insight for which no evidence existed in the literature before. Furthermore, our work was able to confirm that considering playlist homogeneity aspects does not only lead to performance improvements in offline experiments -- as indicated by past research -- but also to a better quality perception by users. However, the observations also revealed that user studies of this type can be easily distorted by item familiarity biases, because the participants tend to evaluate continuation alternatives better when they know the track or the artist. Traditional music recommendation techniques suffer from limited performance due to the sparsity of user-music interaction data, which is addressed by incorporating auxiliary information. In this paper, we study the problem of personalized music recommendation that takes different kinds of auxiliary information into consideration. To achieve this goal, a Heterogeneous Information Graph (HIG) is first constructed to encode different kinds of heterogeneous information, including the interactions between users and music pieces, music playing sequences, and the metadata of music pieces. Based on HIG, a Heterogeneous Information Graph Embedding method (HIGE) is proposed to learn the latent low-dimensional representations of music pieces. Then, we further develop a context-aware music recommendation method. Extensive experiments have been conducted on real-world datasets to compare the proposed method with other state-of-the-art recommendation methods. The results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms those baselines, especially on sparse datasets. Abstract Mass consumption of large collections of digital music asks for efficient and intuitive ways of organization. In this article, a system is presented which recognizes the evoked music mood on the basis of a wide variety of features, closely sticking to real world conditions. A two-dimensional mood model is discussed in which moods resemble binary values for arousal and valence and an easy and thus user-friendly method is presented through which a fuzzy seven-class mood cluster is deducted. The songs of the ‘Twenty Years of MTV Europe Most Wanted’ music database consisting of recorded pop music tracks serve for evaluation of three groups of features: firstly, traditional features such as rhythm and tonal features, zero crossing rate, cepstral, and MPEG-7 Low Level Descriptors for audio content are extracted. Secondly, lyrics, chord sequences, and genre data are obtained from on-line sources. Thirdly, from all these, the high-level features, musical mode, and as a novel feature, the suited ballroom ... The temporal structure of music is essential for the cognitive processes related to the emotions expressed in music. However, such temporal information is often disregarded in typical Music Information Retrieval modeling tasks of predicting higher-level cognitive or semantic aspects of music such as emotions, genre, and similarity. This paper addresses the specific hypothesis whether temporal information is essential for predicting expressed emotions in music, as a prototypical example of a cognitive aspect of music. We propose to test this hypothesis using a novel processing pipeline: 1) Extracting audio features for each track resulting in a multivariate "feature time series". 2) Using generative models to represent these time series (acquiring a complete track representation). Specifically, we explore the Gaussian Mixture model, Vector Quantization, Autoregressive model, Markov and Hidden Markov models. 3) Utilizing the generative models in a discriminative setting by selecting the Probability Product Kernel as the natural kernel for all considered track representations. We evaluate the representations using a kernel based model specifically extended to support the robust two-alternative forced choice self-report paradigm, used for eliciting expressed emotions in music. The methods are evaluated using two data sets and show increased predictive performance using temporal information, thus supporting the overall hypothesis. 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.