An Interactive Personal Audio Database for Musicians

As the high-capacity data storage devices (e.g. portable hard drives, and USB flash drives) become available to everyone, musicians are able to record all of their rehearsals and save them digitally. Given large amount of unlabeled and unorganized rehearsal recordings, manually organizing them can be a huge task. Therefore, managing music audio databases for practicing musicians automatically is a new and interesting challenge. This thesis describes a systematic investigation to provide useful capabilities to musicians both in rehearsal and when practicing alone. The goal is to allow musicians to automatically record, organize, and retrieve rehearsal (and other) audio to facilitate review and practice (for example, playing along with difficult passages). In order to accomplish this task, three separate problems should be solved: • Given the original recordings, extract the music segments and get rid of the nonmusic parts. A novel music classification system based on Eigenmusic and AdaBoost classifier to separate rehearsal recordings into segments is proposed. • Given the music segments from the previous step, the system should be able to group the segments which belong to the same composition together. An unsupervised clustering and alignment process to organize segments is introduced. • Finally, an interactive user interface is required for musicians to easily access and compare the previous rehearsals. The thesis provides a digital music display interface that provides both graphical input and output in terms of conventional music notation. The thesis will address each of these 3 problems and provide an implementation that works in practice. Some future work is also described.