machine learning techniques for music prediction s. grant lowe advisor: prof. nick webb

MACHINE LEARNING TECHNIQUES FOR MUSIC PREDICTION S. Grant Lowe

Advisor: Prof. Nick Webb

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Can we predict the year in which a song was released?

Can we predict the genre of a song?

Can we identify which attributes are the strongest in answering these questions?

BACKGROUND

Hit Song Science Genre Classification Year Prediction

APPROACH

Use WEKA Use the Million Song Dataset

WEKA

Machine Learning Software Contains Visualization tools and

algorithms for data analysis and modeling

DATA

Million Song Data Set: commercial tracks from 1922-2011,collected by LabROSA

EARLY CHALLENGES

Data in the wrong Format: HDF5 vs CSV Lots of missing Data! Almost half of the songs are missing

year, a very important attribute Many attributes are being ignored

because a majority of the songs are missing data.

ArtistID -> Year?

ATTRIBUTES

The MSD contains 53 descriptive attributes for each song, along with 90 timbre attributes. Attributes were removed if they were not good indicators of release year or genre, or if they were too closely tied to what was being classified.

ATTRIBUTE MOTIVATION

Ranked Descriptive Attributes• Loudness (measured in decibels)• Duration (in seconds)• Tempo (estimated tempo in BPM)• Time Signature (estimated beats per bar)• Key • Mode (major or minor)

Timbre is the quality of a musical note or sound that distinguishes different types of musical instruments, or voices. It is a complex notion also referred to as sound color, texture, or tone quality, and is derived from the shape of a segment’s spectro-temporal surface, independently of pitch and loudness.

EARLY RESULTS – DESCRIPTIVE ATTRIBUTES Discretized into 6 decades; 1960-1970, 1970-1980, etc. Baseline (Chance selection): 16.67% First Tests: 6-9% correctly classified More recent Tests: 25-30% Why Random Forest and BayesNet?

EARLY RESULTS

TIMBRE RESULTS

GENRE PREDICTION

Genres: Classic pop and rock Classical Dance and Electronica Folk Hip-Hop Jazz Metal Pop Rock and Indie Soul and Reggae

GENRE PREDICTION RESULTS

CONCLUSIONS & FUTURE WORK

Timbre Attributes are better than Descriptive Attributes – Why?

Taste Profile Lyrical/Emotional Content Tag Dataset

QUESTIONS?