Automatic music classification with jmir

• Authors: Cory Mckay
• Venue: Automatic music classification with jmir
• Year: 2010

Automatic music classification is a wide-ranging and multidisciplinary area of inquiry that offers significant benefits from both academic and commercial perspectives. This dissertation focuses on the development of jMIR, a suite of powerful, flexible, accessible and original software tools that can be used to design, share and apply a wide range of automatic music classification technologies. jMIR permits users to extract meaningful information from audio recordings, symbolic musical representations and cultural information available on the Internet; to use machine learning technologies to automatically build classification models; to automatically collect profiling statistics and detect metadata errors in musical collections; to perform experiments on large, stylistically diverse and well-labelled collections of music in both audio and symbolic formats; and to store and distribute information that is essential to automatic music classification in expressive and flexible standardised file formats. In order to have as diverse a range of applications as possible, care was taken to avoid tying jMIR to any particular types of music classification. Rather, it is designed to be a general-purpose toolkit that can be applied to arbitrary types of music classification. Each of the jMIR components is also designed to be accessible not only by users with a high degree of expertise in computer-based research technologies, but also by researchers with valuable musical expertise, but perhaps less of a background in computational research. Moreover, although the jMIR software can certainly be used as a set of ready-to-use tools for solving music classification problems directly, it is also designed to serve as an open-source platform for developing and testing original algorithms. This dissertation also describes several experiments that were performed with jMIR. These experiments were intended not only to verify the effectiveness of the software, but also to investigate the utility of combining information from different types of musical data, an approach with the potential to significantly advance the performance of automatic music classification in general.