Audio and music analysis on the web using Essentia.js

Abstract

Open-source software libraries have a significant impact on the development of Audio Signal Processing and Music Information Retrieval (MIR) systems. Despite the abundance of such tools, there is a lack of an extensive and easy-to-use reference library for audio feature extraction on Web clients.

In this article, we present Essentia.js, an open-source JavaScript (JS) library for audio and music analysis on both web clients and JS engines. Along with the Web Audio API, it can be used for both offline and real-time audio feature extraction on web browsers. Essentia.js is modular, lightweight, and easy-to-use, deploy, maintain, and integrate into the existing plethora of JS libraries and web technologies. It is powered by a WebAssembly back end cross-compiled from the Essentia C++ library, which facilitates a JS interface to a wide range of low-level and high-level audio features, including signal processing MIR algorithms as well as pre-trained TensorFlow.js machine learning models. It also provides a higher-level JS API and add-on MIR utility modules along with extensive documentation, usage examples, and tutorials. We benchmark the proposed library on two popular web browsers and the Node.js engine, and four devices, including mobile Android and iOS, comparing it to the native performance of Essentia and the Meyda JS library.