Christof Weiß

University of Wuerzburg | JMU · Department of Computer Science

Many tasks in music information retrieval (MIR) involve weakly aligned data, where exact temporal correspondences are unknown. The connectionist temporal classification (CTC) loss is a standard technique to learn feature representations based on weakly aligned training data. However, CTC is limited to discrete-valued target sequences and can be dif...

The extraction of harmonic information from musical audio is fundamental for several music information retrieval tasks. In this paper, we propose novel harmonic audio features based on the perceptually-inspired tonal interval vector space, computed as the Fourier transform of chroma vectors. Our contribution includes mid-level features for musical...

Given a music recording, music structure analysis aims at identifying important structural elements and segmenting the recording according to these elements. In jazz music, a performance is often structured by repeating harmonic schemata (known as choruses), which lay the foundation for improvisation by soloists. Within the fields of music informat...

This paper approaches the automatic detection of musical patterns in audio recordings with a particular focus on leitmotifs, which are specific types of patterns associated with certain characters, places, items, or feelings occurring in an opera or movie soundtrack. The detection of such leitmotifs is particularly challenging since their appearanc...

Automatically detecting the presence of singing in music audio recordings is a central task within music information retrieval. While modern machine-learning systems produce high-quality results on this task, the reported experiments are usually limited to popular music and the trained systems often overfit to confounding factors. In this paper, we...

This article presents a multimodal dataset comprising various representations and annotations of Franz Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise . Schubert’s seminal work constitutes an outstanding example of the Romantic song cycle—a central genre within Western classical music. Our dataset unifies several public sources and annotations carefully created...

Electroacoustic music is experienced primarily through auditory perception, as it is not usually based on a prescriptive score. For the analysis of such pieces, transcriptions are sometimes created to illustrate events and processes graphically in a readily comprehensible way. These are usually based on the spectrogram of the recording. Although th...

While global key and chord estimation for both popular and classical music recordings have received a lot of attention, little research has been devoted to estimating the local key for classical music. Partly, this may be due to its inherent ambiguity and subjectivity, which makes annotating local keys a challenging task. In this article, we approa...

From the 19th century on, several composers of Western opera made use of leitmotifs (short musical ideas referring to semantic entities such as characters, places, items, or feelings) for guiding the audience through the plot and illustrating the events on stage. A prime example of this compositional technique is Richard Wagner's four-opera cycle D...

The computational analysis of music has traditionally seen a sharp divide between the "audio approach" relying on signal processing and the "symbolic approach" based on scores. Likewise, there has also been an unfortunate gap between any such computational endeavour and more traditional approaches as used in historical musicology. In this paper, we...

Choral singing is a central part of musical cultures across the world, yet many facets of this widespread form of polyphonic singing are still to be explored. Music information retrieval (MIR) research on choral singing benefits from multitrack recordings of the individual singing voices. However, there exist only few publicly available multitrack...

In this paper, we approach the problem of detecting segments of singing voice activity in opera recordings. We consider three state-of-the-art methods for singing voice detection based on supervised deep learning. We train and test these models on a novel dataset comprising three annotated performances (versions) of Richard Wagner’s opera “Die Walk...

Western classical music comprises a rich repertoire composed for different ensembles. Often, these ensembles consist of instruments from one or two of the families wood-winds, brass, piano, vocals, and strings. In this paper, we consider the task of automatically recognizing instrument families from music recordings. As one main contribution , we i...

Unaccompanied vocal music is a central part of Western art music, yet it requires excellent skills for singers to achieve proper intonation. In this paper, we analyze intonation deficiencies by introducing an intonation cost measure that can be computed from choir recordings and may help to assess the singers' intonation quality. With our approach...

Electroacoustic music is experienced primarily through hearing, as it is not usually based on a prescriptive score. For the analysis of such pieces, transcriptions are sometimes created to illustrate events and processes graphically in a readily comprehensible way. These are usually based on the spectrogram of the recording. Although transcriptions...

For musicological studies on large corpora, the compilation of suitable data constitutes a time-consuming step. In particular, this is true for high-quality symbolic representations that are generated manually in a tedious process. A recent study on Western classical music has shown that musical phenomena such as the evolution of tonal complexity o...

In musicology, there has been a long debate about a meaningful partitioning and description of music history regarding composition styles. Particularly, concepts of historical periods have been criticized since they cannot account for the continuous and interwoven evolution of style. To systematically study this evolution, large corpora are necessa...

Richard Wagner's cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, consisting of four music dramas, constitutes a comprehensive work of high importance for Western music history. In this paper, we indicate how MIR methods can be applied to explore this large-scale work with respect to tonal properties. Our investigations are based on a data set that contains 16 audio...

Die computergestützte Erschließung und Analyse von Musikdaten ist eine zentrale Auf-gabenstellung der Musikverarbeitung. Ein wichtiges Teilproblem ist die Erkennung von tonalen Strukturen wie Akkorden oder Skalen. In diesem Beitrag diskutieren wir Methoden für die Visualisie-rung harmonischer Verläufe von Musikwerken und wenden diese exemplarisch a...

In this paper, we address the task of transferring measure annotations between different recordings (versions) of a musical composition. Such annotations are useful for analyzing, linking, and navigating in multi-version scenarios of classical music. Given a version with manually annotated time positions, such as the beginning of musical measures,...

With the tremendously growing impact of digital technology, the ways of accessing music crucially changed. Nowadays, streaming services, download platforms, and private archives provide a large amount of music recordings to listeners. In the area of Music Information Retrieval, researchers are developing automatic methods for organizing and browsin...

In diesem Artikel versuchen wir anhand eines konkreten Beispiels zu skizzieren, inwiefern informatische Methoden gewinnbringend im Bereich der Musikwissenschaft eingesetzt werden können und inwiefern umgekehrt musikwissenschaftliche Fragestellungen zu neuen Herausforderungen in der Informatik führen. Konkret stellen wir computerbasierte Werkzeuge v...

We study the automatic identification of Western classical music styles by directly using chroma histograms as classification features. Thereby, we evaluate the benefits of knowing a piece's global key for estimating key-related pitch classes. First, we present four automatic key detection systems. We compare their performance on suitable datasets...

In this paper, we focus on the automatic classification of jazz records. We propose a novel approach where we break down the ambiguous task, which is commonly referred to as genre classification, into three more specific semantic levels. First, the rhythm feel (swing, latin, funk, two-beat) characterizes the basic groove organization and most often...

We present an algorithm for visualizing the tonal characteristics of classical music audio recordings. The method is inspired by music theory concepts on harmony and intended to assist musicological research. Our system bases on chroma features that are extracted from the audio data in order to represent the dominant local pitch classes. Hence, the...

We propose a new method to automatically determine key signature changes. In automatic music transcription, unconsidered sections in distantly related keys may lead to music scores that are hard to read due to a high number of notated accidentals. The problem of key change is commonly addressed by finding the correct local key out of the 24 major a...

We evaluate our novel approach to global key extraction from audio recordings, restricting ourselves to the genre Classical only. Especially in this field of music, musical key is a significant information since many works include the key in their title. Our rule-based method relies on pre-extracted chroma features and puts special emphasis on the...

We study a supersymmetric version of the seesaw mechanism type-III considering two variants of the model: a minimal version for explaining neutrino data with only two copies of 24-plet superfields and a model with three generations of 24-plets. The latter predicts in general rates for $\mu\to e\gamma$ inconsistent with experimental data. However, t...

1. Aufl. Vydavatel: Bohème - Bayerisch-Böhmischer Kulturverein in Amberg e.V. "Begleitband zur Uraufführung des Oratoriums in der Wallfahrtskirche Mariahilf, Amberg, am 21. März 2010 mit des Stückes vollständigem Texte, einer ausführlich hinführenden Einführung, Auszügen aus der Partitur, Abbildungen graphischer und plastischer Arbeiten Harald Bäum...