Publications

Re-visiting the Music Segmentation Problem with Crowdsourcing

International Society of Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR)

Publication date: October 23, 2017

Cheng-i Wang, Gautham Mysore, Shlomo Dubnov

Identifying boundaries in music structural segmentation is a well studied music information retrieval problem. The goal is to develop algorithms that automatically identify segmenting time points in music that closely matches human annotated data. The annotation itself is challenging due to its subjective nature, such as the degree of change that constitutes a boundary, the location of such boundaries, and whether a boundary should be assigned to a single time frame or a range of frames. Existing datasets have been annotated by small number of experts and the annotators tend to be constrained to specific definitions of segmentation boundaries. In this paper, we re-examine the annotation problem. We crowdsource the problem to a large number of annotators and present an analysis of the results. Our preliminary study suggests that although there is a correlation to existing datasets, this form of annotations reveals additional information such as stronger vs. weaker boundaries, gradual vs. sudden boundaries, and the difference in perception of boundaries between musicians and non-musicians. The study suggests that it could be worth re-defining certain aspects of the boundary identification in music structural segmentation problem with a broader definition.


Research Area:  Adobe Research iconAudio