~ Tarsos presentation at 'ISMIR 2011'

Olmo Cornelis and myself just gave a presentation about Tarsos at the at the 12th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference which is held at Miami.

The live demo we gave went well and we got a lot of positive, interesting feedback. The presentation about Tarsos is available here.

It was the first time in the history of ISMIR that there was a session with oral presentations about Non-Western Music. We were pleased to be part of this.

The peer reviewed paper about our work: Tarsos – a Platform to Explore Pitch Scales in Non-Western and Western Music is available from the ISMIR website and embedded below:

Computational ethnomusicology, Research papers, Music Information Retrieval, Presentation, en Tarsos

2011.10.25.ismir_tarsos.pdf

~ PeachNote Piano at the ISMIR 2011 demo session

The extended abstract about PeachNote Piano has been accepted as a demonstration presentation to appear at the ISMIR 2011 conference in Miami. To know more about PeachNote Piano come see us at our demo stand (during the Late Breaking and Demo Session) or read the paper: Peachnote Piano: Making MIDI instruments social and smart using Arduino, Android and Node.js. What follows here is the introduction of the extended abstract:

Playing music instruments can bring a lot of joy and satisfaction, but not all apsects of music practice are always enjoyable. In this contribution we are addressing two such sometimes unwelcome aspects: the solitude of practicing and the “dumbness” of instruments.

The process of practicing and mastering of music instruments often takes place behind closed doors. A student of piano spends most of her time alone with the piano. Sounds of her playing get lost, and she can’t always get feedback from friends, teachers, or, most importantly, random Internet users. Analysing her practicing sessions is also not easy. The technical possibility to record herself and put the recordings online is there, but the needed effort is relatively high, and so one does it only occasionally, if at all.

Instruments themselves usually do not exhibit any signs of intelligence. They are practically mechanic devices, even when implemented digitally. Usually they react only to direct actions of a player, and the player is solely responsible for the music coming out of the insturment and its quality. There is no middle ground between passive listening to music recordings and active music making for someone who is alone with an instrument.

We have built a prototype of a system that strives to offer a practical solution to the above problems for digital pianos. From ground up, we have built a system which is capable of transmitting MIDI data from a MIDI instrument to a web service and back, exposing it in real-time to the world and optionally enriching it.

A previous post about PeachNote Piano has more technical details together with a video showing the core functionality (quasi-instantaneous USB-BlueTooth-MIDI communication). Some photos can be found below.

PeachNote Piano enclosure

PeachNote Piano in action

PeachNote Piano Schema

PeachNote Piano Arduino Shield

PeachNote Piano assembled

Research papers, Music Information Retrieval, Code, Computational musicology, Presentation, en PeachNote Piano

PeachNote_Piano_ISMIR_Demo.pdf

~ Simplify Collaboration on a LaTeX Documents with Dropbox and a Build Server

Problem

While working on a Latex document with several collaborators some problems arise:

• Who has the latest version of the TeX-files?
• Which LaTeX distributions are in use (MiKTeX, LiveTex,…)
• Are all LaTeX packages correctly installed on each computer?
• Why is the bibliography, generated with BiBTeX, not included or incomplete?
• How does the final PDF look like when it is build by one of the collaborators, with a different LaTeX distribution?

Especially installing and maintaining LaTeX distributions on different platforms (Mac OS X, Linux, Windows) in combination with a lot of LaTeX packages can be challenging. This blog post presents a way to deal with these problems.

Solution

The solution proposed here uses a build-server. The server is responsible for compiling the LaTeX source files and creating a PDF-file when the source files are modified. The source files should be available on the server should be in sync with the latest versions of the collaborators. Also the new PDF-file should be distributed. The syncing and distribution of files is done using a Dropbox install. Each author installs a Dropbox share (available on all platforms) which is also installed on the server. When an author modifies a file, this change is propagated to the server, which, in turn, builds a PDF and sends the resulting file back. This has the following advantages:

• Everyone always has the latest version of files;
• Only one LaTeX install needs to be maintained (on the server);
• The PDF is the same for each collaborator;
• You can modify files on every platform with Dropbox support (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows) and even smartphones;
• Compiling a large LaTeX file can be computationally intensive, a good task for a potentially beefy server.

Implementation

The implementation of this is done with a couple of bash-scripts running on Ubuntu Linux. LaTeX compilation is handeled by the LiveTeX distribution. The first script compile.bash handles compilation in multiple stages: the cross referencing and BiBTeX bibliography need a couple of runs to get everything right.

  
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11

  
#!/bin/bash
#first iteration: generate aux file
pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode --src-specials article.tex
#run bibtex on the aux file
bibtex article.aux
#second iteration: include bibliography
pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode --src-specials article.tex
#third iteration: fix references
pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode --src-specials article.tex
#remove unused files
rm article.aux article.bbl article.blg article.out

The second script watcher.bash is more interesting. It watches the Dropbox directory for changes (only in .tex-files) using the efficient inotify library. If a modification is detected the compile script (above) is executed.

  
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14

  
#!/bin/bash
directory=/home/user/Dropbox/article/
#recursivly watch te directory
while inotifywait -r $directory; do
  #find all files changed the last minute that match tex
  #if there are matches then do something...
  if find $directory -mmin -1 | grep tex; then
    #tex files changed => recompile
    echo "Tex file changed... compiling"
    /bin/bash $directory/compile.bash
    #sleep a minute to prevent recompilation loop
    sleep 60
  fi
done

To summarize: a user-friendly way of collaboration on LaTeX documents was presented. Some server side configuration needs to be done but the clients only need Dropbox and a simple text editor and can start working togheter.

Research papers, Code, en LaTeX

~ Tarsos at 'ISMIR 2011'

A paper about Tarsos was submitted for review at the 12th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference which will be held in Miami. The paper Tarsos – a Platform to Explore Pitch Scales in Non-Western and Western Music was reviewed and accepted, it will be published in this year’s proceedings of the ISMIR conference. It can be read below as well.

An oral presentation about Tarsos is going to take place Tuesday, the 25 of October during the afternoon, as can be seen on the ISMIR preliminary program schedule.

If you want to cite our work, please use the following data:

  
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

  
@inproceedings{six2011tarsos,
  author     = {Joren Six and Olmo Cornelis},
  title      = {Tarsos - a Platform to Explore Pitch Scales 
                in Non-Western and Western Music},
  booktitle  = {Proceedings of the 12th International 
                Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference,
                ISMIR 2011},
  year       = {2011},
  publisher  = {International Society for Music Information Retrieval}
}

Computational ethnomusicology, Research papers, Music Information Retrieval, Code, featured, en Tarsos

tarsos_ismir_paper.bibtex.txt en tarsos_ismir_2011.pdf

~ ARIP: Artistic Research In Progress

Voor ARIP heb ik een artikel over Tarsos geschreven. Het motiveert kort de bestaansredenen van Tarsos – een applicatie om toonhoogtegebruik in muziek te analyseren – en het artikel geeft een overzicht van de werking van Tarsos aan de hand van een voorbeeld. Hieronder zijn multimediale aanvullingen te vinden bij het artikel.

Ladrang Kandamanyura (slendro pathet manyura), zo heet het muziekfragment dat gebruikt werd in het artikel als voorbeeld van een stuk muziek met een ongewone (voor onze westerse oren toch) toonladder. De CD waarop het stuk te vinden is, is bij wergo te verkrijgen. Een fragment van 30 seconden is hier te beluisteren:

Het fragment kan je ook downloaden om zelf te analyseren met Tarsos.

Ladrang Kandamanyura (slendro pathet manyura)
Courtesy of: WERGO/Schott Music & Media, Mainz, Germany, www.wergo.de and Museum Collection Berlin
Lestari – The Hood Collection, Early Field Recordings from Java (SM 1712 2)
Recorded in 1957 and 1958 in Java – First release

Tarsos Live

Het onderstaande videofragment geeft aan hoe Tarsos gebruikt kan worden om in real time stemmingen te meten. Geluid afkomstig van een microfoon wordt dan meteen geanalyseerd en onmiddellijke feedback toont een gespeeld of gezongen interval. Het maakt kwarttonen of andere (ongewone) intervallen visueel duidelijk. Tarsos kan zo gebruikt worden door zangers of strijkers die willen experimenteren met microtonaliteit. Ook kan het handig zijn voor etnomusicologisch veldwerk: bijvoorbeeld om kora (een Afrikaanse harp) toonladders te documenteren.

Spectrogram

Annotaties

Ambitus

Toonladder

Computational ethnomusicology, Research papers, Computational musicology, Presentation, ARIP, en Tarsos

arip.doc, 08._Ladrang_Kandamanyura_10s-20s.wav, en arip.pdf

~ Digital Music Research Network Workshop - Queen Mary University London

Monday the 20th and Tuesday the 21th of December I attended two workshops at The Queen Mary University of London: The Machine Listening Workshop and Digital Music Research Network One-day Workshop 2010

At the workshop I had an interesting meeting with Dan Tidhar. He researches harpsichord temperament estimation at QMUL. Together they created the Tempest web service where you can upload harpsichord audio and let the system guess the temperament. The process is described in the paper “High precision frequency estimation for harpsichord tuning classification”. Although Tarsos was not officially part of the programme I hijacked the poster sessions to show a live demo of Tarsos with Dan’s dataset.

Another interesting talk was about 2032, a tunable synthesizer with definable Harmonics. It elaborates on the ideas of Sethares about tone scales .

Computational ethnomusicology, featured, Computational musicology, en Research papers

~ YIN Pitch Tracker in JAVA

To make Tarsos more portable I wrote a pitch tracker in pure JAVA using the YIN algorithm based on the implementation in C of aubio. The implementation also uses some code written by Karl Helgasson and Teun de Lange.

It can be used to perform real time pitch detection or to analyse files. To use it as a real time pitch detector just start the JAR-file by double clicking. To analyse a file execute one of the following. The first results in a list of annotations (text), the second shows the annotations graphically.

  
1
2

  
java -jar pitch_detector_yin.jar  flute.novib.mf.C5B5.wav
java -jar pitch_detector_yin.jar  --file flute.novib.mf.C5B5.wav

The provided flute sample is from The Musical Samples library of the University of Iowa and converted to mono wav. The source code of the pitch tracker can be found below.

Screenshot

Research papers, featured, Music Information Retrieval, Code, Java, en Tarsos

flute.novib.mf.C5B5.wav, pitch_detector_yin.jar, en pitch_detector_yin_src.zip