MIRMaid: An interface for a content based Music Information Retrieval test-bed

Cloete, Candice Lynn (2006) MIRMaid: An interface for a content based Music Information Retrieval test-bed, MPhil.

PDF final1.pdf Download (1MB)

Abstract

Music Information Retrieval (MlR) is the interdisciplinary science of retrieving information from music and includes influences from different areas, like music perception and cognition, music analysis, signal processing, music indexing and information retrieval [Futrelle & Downie, 2003]. To produce the most efficient MlR systems, test-beds are commonly used to test different combinations of parameters against each other. The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate the composition of algorithms for MlR systems by constructing an interface that could form part of a test-bed. It differs from other interfaces and frameworks that are used in MlR test-beds because it is focused on small scale test-beds. MIRMaid is an acronym for Music Information Retrieval Modular aid and is an interface that allows different content based retrieval tasks to be compared against each other to find optimal combinations of retrieval parameters for specialised problem domains. The dissertation describes the process of how the MIRMaid interface was developed, modified and refined. A big challenge was to design the user experiments in a way that considered potential users of the interface while using the test subjects I had at my disposal. I decided to use the simplest queries to highlight basic similarities between novice and potential expert users. The performance of the interface was judged by user ratings on a questionnaire. The interface performed reasonably well with expert users and novice users. Despite these results there were a few interesting observations that were returned from the user experiments related to the experiment design and the task explanations. Some suggestions are also provided for extending the interface to allow it to be used with other types of data. The possibility is also investigated for using the interface as a tool for simplifying the process of integrating modules from different sources.

Item Type:	Electronic thesis or dissertation (MPhil)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Music Information Retrieval,test-bed, interoperability, interface, audio content extraction
Subjects:	Human-centered computing Applied computing > Arts and humanities
Date Deposited:	07 Jul 2008
Last Modified:	10 Oct 2019 15:35
URI:	http://pubs.cs.uct.ac.za/id/eprint/460

Actions (login required)

View Item