Training computers to understand the language of music

[pljones]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-29146655

Well now. That sounds... very odd. Pass your song through a

"plug-in"

and tag it with how you feel it sounds. Then tell the plug-in how you'd like it to feel and pass it through again. And, as if by magic, your wish is met! Well, unfortunately, the Beeb didn't see fit to link to anywhere with examples, so I don't have much to go on. The author of the "plug-in" is Dr Ryan Stables - http://www.bcu.ac.uk/digital-media-tech ... processing

His research interests span a wide range of topics from machine listening and music information retrieval to sonification and humanisation.

And the site itself gives this:
http://www.bcu.ac.uk/news-events/news/u ... -musicians
which links to
http://www.semanticaudio.co.uk/
So now time to try them out!

[robenestobenz]

Fascinating, thanks for posting. I'll definitely give this a try when I get some time.

Also, from the BBC article:

The crucial thing is the sound input - for example you could never make a glockenspiel sound warm no matter how you processed it

Never sound warm? What's a geezer on about? He needs some KVR education: a glockenspiel is analogue!

I bet I could warm up a glockenspiel. And I don't mean by sitting on one.

[pljones]

Yeah, that's what I thought.

Looks like it's just a tagging system for presets on the four plugins they provide from the website. Not tried them out yet but I can't see that it's doing much else. As it says in the main article, it can't get "somewhere between warm and fuzzy".

---edit
According to the manual it does some audio analysis when you hit "save". Source is on github, so someone with some DSP knowledge might like a look.

[jancivil]

The crucial thing is the sound input - for example you could never make a glockenspiel sound warm no matter how you processed it

I bet I could warm up a glockenspiel. And I don't mean by sitting on one.

Yeah, he should limit himself to speaking for what he can't do. I can think of all sorts of ways to.

The article runs from suggesting AI to 'it's a very simple plugin'. I think I would rather have my own process for fluffy vs spiky and enjoy the process.

I don't really take 'an algorithm kind of does x' to equal 'intelligence'.