Danceability

Last week I was lucky to have the chance to listen to invited talks by Sebastian Streich and Bee Suan Ong (both currently working at Yamaha in Japan). Bee Suan talked about some of her work on the structural analysis of music. I wouldn't be surprised if her approach would have easily scored highest in last year's MIREX cover song identification task. Unfortunately she was too busy to participate (finishing her PhD, getting married, moving to Japan, ...). Also Sebastian's talk was very interesting. Generally, complexity in music is a very interesting topic. He wrote a nice discussion on it in chapter 2 of his thesis. The one thing I found most interesting from his talk was the following figure (page 90 in his thesis):



Basically it shows how his danceability feature that he extracts from audio correlates with descriptors you find on AMG. I find the correlations rather impressive. The curves are very smooth (although he does not display any measure for the variance this indicates that the variance is low enough), and the correlations are meaningful. For example, party music is more danceable than romantic music. I think his graph is a very intuitive way to communicate what his extracted feature does and how it relates to concepts that we use when talking about music. Personally I find it magnitudes more useful than an evaluation showing that if you include a certain feature in a black box genre/mood/style/whatever classifier, then the performance increases by 5%.

Recent PhDs

5 PhDs were recently added to the list of MIR PhDs: Nicholas M. Collins, Sebastian Streich, Bee Suan Ong, Rainer Typke, and Johann-Markus Batke. Sebastian and Bee Suan have joined Yamaha in Japan. Rainer has joined the legendary intelligent music processing group at OFAI (who will be co-organizing ISMIR this year).

It seems like this year the number of completed PhDs could be higger than in any previous year. Other candidates in the queue include Enric Guaus, Roy Pierre, Kris West, Perfecto Herrera, Adam Berenzweig and many more.

BTW, Thomas Lidy recently completed his Master's thesis. The title is "Evaluation of New Audio Features and Their Utilization in Novel Music Retrieval Applications" (PDF). Thomas has been active in the MIR community (publishing at ISMIR and participating in MIREX for the last two years). He is a core team member of Andreas Rauber's group who will be co-organizing ISMIR this year.