News: Analyzing Music the Digital Way

Philadelphia Inquirer (09/22/08) Avril, Tom
Engineers, musicians, and computer researchers recently gathered at Drexel University for the International Conference on Music Information Retrieval to discuss using computers to analyze and manage the world of sound. The event was first held in Plymouth, Mass., in 2000, with music theorists and librarians heavily represented among the few dozen attendees. Now, the event is far more technology oriented. Some of the technologies could be incorporated into iPods in the next 18 months, possibly helping listeners sort through an unruly music collection. A key part of the conference is the announcements of results from a competition in which various universities pit their music-analysis algorithms against one another. Entrants from more than a dozen countries competed in 18 tasks, using their computers to listen to selections of music and identify aspects such as genre, mood, composer, and title. The goal is to eventually help people search for music they might like by autonomously combing through millions of audio files. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign professor J. Stephen Downie was particularly impressed by the entrants' success at identifying cover songs by different artists. Another task challenged the algorithms to identify tunes someone hummed, which could eventually enable karaoke machines and music shops to identify the song that someone is humming and provide it to them.
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