Shicheng Zhang

Zehao Wang, Shicheng Zhang, Xiaoou Chen

Melody is one of the most important components in music. Unlike other components in music theory, such as harmony and counterpoint, computable features for melody is urgently in need. These features are highly demanded as data-driven methods dominating the fields such as musical information retrieval and automatic music composition. To boost the performance of deep-learning-related musical tasks, we propose a set of interpretable features on monophonic melody for computational purposes. These features are defined not only in mathematical form, but also with some considerations on composers 'intuition. For example, the Melodic Center of Gravity can reflect the sentence-wise contour of the melody, the local / global melody dynamics quantifies the dynamics of a melody that couples pitch and time in a sentence. We found that these features are considered by people universally in many genres of songs, even for atonal composition practices. Hopefully, these melodic features can provide nov el inspiration for future researchers as a tool in the field of MIR and automatic composition.

Zehao Wang, Jingru Li, Xiaoou Chen et al.

Unlike melody extraction and other aspects of music transcription, research on playing technique detection is still in its early stages. Compared to existing work mostly focused on playing technique detection for individual single notes, we propose a general end-to-end method based on Sound Event Detection by FCN for musical instrument playing technique detection. In our case, we choose Erhu, a well-known Chinese bowed-stringed instrument, to experiment with our method. Because of the limitation of FCN, we present an algorithm to detect on variable length audio. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is tested on a new dataset, its categorization of techniques is similar to our training dataset. The highest accuracy of our 3 experiments on the new test set is 87.31%. Furthermore, we also evaluate the performance of the proposed framework on 10 real-world studio music (produced by midi) and 7 real-world recording samples to address the ability of generalization on our model.