1. Brian Whitman Paris Smaragdis MIT Media Lab
Combining Musical and Cultural Features for Intelligent Style Detection
Brian Whitman
Paris Smaragdis
MIT Media Lab

2. Background Music classification by style
A “human” concept; hard to model.
Defines subclasses of genres.
Can be utilized by recommendation engine for high-confidence results.
11/6/2018
ISE599 - by Frances Kao

3. Approach An automatic style detection system that operate on both of
acoustic content of the audio
community metadata: a vector space of descriptive textual terms crawled from the web
Dataset: 5 styles, each with 5 different artists
11/6/2018
ISE599 - by Frances Kao

4. Audio-based Classification
Form each song into some presentation
Train a neural network to classify a song
Representation: randomly choose 12 songs of each artist -> downsampling -> extract Power Spectral Density (PSD) -> use Principal Components Analysis (PCA) to reduce dimension -> representation of each artist.
Feedforward time-delay neural network
11/6/2018
ISE599 - by Frances Kao

5. Audio-based Classification – Result
Heavy Metal
Contemporary Country
Hardcore Rap
Intelligent Dance Music
R&B
Fail to overcome intra-style auditory inconsistency. Particularly not good for IDM.
Since this style is with huge auditory variance.
11/6/2018
ISE599 - by Frances Kao

6. Community Metadata-based Classification (1)
Cultural feature
Each artist is associated with terms which appear on the same web document as the artists’ name.
Each term has a score calculated in terms of position and frequency of occurrence.
11/6/2018
ISE599 - by Frances Kao

7. Community Metadata-based Classification (2)
Similarity
For every 2 artists, calculate an overlap weight, which is the summation of every shared term.
Form a similarity matrix to predict the style of each artist
11/6/2018
ISE599 - by Frances Kao

8. Community Metadata-based Classification - Result
Heavy Metal
Contemporary Country
Hardcore Rap
Intelligent Dance Music
R&B
Performed somewhat not perfectly for 2 styles, Rap and R&B.
11/6/2018
ISE599 - by Frances Kao

9. Combined Classification
Heavy Metal
Contemporary Country
Hardcore Rap
Intelligent Dance Music
R&B
Posterior probability, and average value
11/6/2018
ISE599 - by Frances Kao

10. Conclusion & Future Work
Combined classification can overcome all the problems
Future development can use a “culture ratio” to alert recommendation engines to use which classification method.
11/6/2018
ISE599 - by Frances Kao