Research Seminars

Making music synchronization more accurate and chroma features more robust to timbre changes

Sebastian Ewert, Bonn University

Wednesday 12 August 2009, 14:00, Room 105

Abstract

This talk will describe a current project at Goldsmiths with the aim to transfer Chris Harte's Beatles chord transcriptions from the audio to the MIDI domain to evaluate a chord labeler for symbolic data developed at ISMS. This transfer is achieved using music synchronization methods which, for a given position in one representation of a piece of music, determine the corresponding position within another representation. The talk will start with a short introduction to the concepts usually found in music synchronization approaches including some application demos. After these foundations some advancements in the field of music synchronization developed at groups in Saarbrücken and Bonn within the last year will be described which will hopefully lead to a discussion of open problems later on. The talk will conclude with a description of a new chroma-like audio feature which incorporates ideas from MFCC features to enhance the timbre invariance of classical chroma features.

Bio

Sebastian Ewert finished his Master degree (Diplom) in computer science with a topic on music synchronization and currently pursues his doctoral degree at Bonn University under the supervision of Meinard Müller (MPI Informatik, Saarbruecken). His research interests cover music information retrieval, source separation, and applications of machine learning techniques to automated music processing.