Modelling the Microphone-Related Timbral Brightness of Recorded Signals

Brightness is one of the most common timbral descriptors used for searching audio databases, and is also the timbral attribute of recorded sound that is most affected by microphone choice, making a brightness prediction model desirable for automatic metadata generation. A model, sensitive to microphone-related as well as source-related brightness, was developed based on a novel combination of the spectral centroid and the ratio of the total magnitude of the signal above 500 Hz to that of the full signal. This model performed well on training data (r = 0.922). Validating it on new data showed a slight gradient error but good linear correlation across source types and overall (r = 0.955). On both training and validation data, the new model out-performed metrics previously used for brightness prediction.

Corposing a History of Electronic Music

A current research project led by the author has collated nearly 2,000 historic electronic music works for the purposes of musicology; nonetheless, this collection is highly amenable to composition. New pieces can be realized by rendering a selected chronology of electronic music history. The context is a wider field of compositional endeavor in “corposition” over large audio databases especially opened up by new research in music information retrieval.

Applications and implications of digital audio databases for the field of ethnomusicology: A discussion of the CNRS — Musée de l’Homme sound archives

The online Web-based platform for the French CNRS — Musée de l’Homme audio archives offers access to about 28,000 published and unpublished recordings of music from all over the world. Implemented as an archive database, it represents a collaborative tool for the production of knowledge and its dissemination. This paper introduces these digital audio archives, while dealing with issues around the online display of the recordings and their utility in contemporary academia, as well as the intellectual property rights and ethical issues raised by their availability on the Web to a broad audience.