Fun with Venn

I've been extremely busy the past couple of weeks between a language identification project, a music tag annotation project, and like Elias, trying to improve on my weak areas (although with me, I feel optimization and real analysis are my areas to improve on - good news is that my girlfriend is an unknowing math goddess). Probably did not help that I had to read every researcher's experience in booking at the conference hotel for ISMIR on the Music-IR mailing list. (Side note: why is this conference always at expensive hotels? Thank you, Sun Microsystems!).

Anyway, came across a funny site with Venn diagram and function cartoons. Hilarious. I am such a dork.

NPR API

National Public Radio has released its API. It already looks to be a tremendous research because they have audio content. I'm new to APIs so I'm pretty jazzed about this. I've only gotten to play with it for about 5 minutes, but I have verified that the audio is great. One potential application I foresee is music/speech detection and segmentation. Also, on the speech side, this data is great for topic identification. I'll hopefully have more to say on this later, but for now, I've got to go. It's 8PM on a Friday and my girlfriend is telling me I have to stop working.

Absolute pitch

I'm sure that a few of the readers have seen Yoo Ye Eun. From what I can tell, this does not appear to be a fraud.



Of course, David Huron points out in his book, Sweet Anticipation, that absolute pitch has its disadvantages such as difficulty in judging intervals.

Still, very cool.

MIR Group on CiteULike

I have started a group on CiteULike for music information retrieval researchers focusing on similarity and retrieval from audio. This is to allow us to see what papers others are reading on the subject. The focus is on using non-symbolic audio as the original format. For example, using MFCCs to build genre-level Gaussian mixture models is relevant. Using DTW on MIDI signals is not relevant unless the MIDI signal is a mid-level representation (ex. "Specmurt analysis"). Onset detection is not relevant; however, using onset features to classify dance music is relevant.

I greatly encourage other fields to start their own groups (I may also start more if others join). I felt restrictions on the scope of the group was important because MIR is becoming too broad of a field. I expect that many researchers may be in several groups, which is great and there may be a lot of overlap in the papers appearing in these groups. However, in our "Everything is Miscellaneous" world, this is not a bad thing.

I've restricted that new users must be approved, but this is simply to generate a list of who's who. Anyone that wants to get in will be accepted. I am also willing to free up restrictions on anyomous postings if people want, but I want to prevent abuse since this supposed to be useful and non-combative.