The Musical Avatar: a visualization of musical preferences by means of audio content description

Haro Berois, Martín; Xambó, Anna; Fuhrmann, Ferdinand; Bogdanov, Dmitry; Gómez Gutiérrez, Emilia, 1975-; Herrera Boyer, Perfecto, 1964-

doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1859799.1859813

The Musical Avatar: a visualization of musical preferences by means of audio content description

Citation

Haro M, Xambó A, Fuhrmann F, Bogdanov D, Gómez E, Herrera P. The Musical Avatar: a visualization of musical preferences by means of audio content description. In: AM '10: Proceedings of the 5th Audio Mostly Conference: A Conference on Interaction with Sound; 2010 Sep; Piteå, Sweden. New York: Association for Computing Machinery; 2010. p. 103-10. DOI: 10.1145/1859799.1859813

Abstract

The music we like (i.e. our musical preferences) encodes and communicates key information about ourselves. Depicting such preferences in a condensed and easily understandable way is very appealing, especially considering the current trends in social network communication. In this paper we propose a method to automatically generate, given a provided set of preferred music tracks, an iconic representation of a user's musical preferences -- the Musical Avatar. Starting from the raw audio signal we first compute over 60 low-level audio features. Then, by applying pattern recognition methods, we infer a set of semantic descriptors for each track in the collection. Next, we summarize these track-level semantic descriptors, obtaining a user profile. Finally, we map this collection-wise description to the visual domain by creating a humanoid cartoony character that represents the user's musical preferences. We performed a proof-of-concept evaluation of the proposed method on 11 subjects with promising results. The analysis of the users' evaluations shows a clear preference for avatars generated by the proposed semantic descriptors over avatars derived from neutral or randomly generated values. We also found a general agreement on the representativeness of the users' musical preferences via the proposed visualization strategy.

Description

Comunicació presentada a: AM '10: The 5th Audio Mostly Conference: A Conference on Interaction with Sound celebrat al setembre de 2010 a Piteå, Suècia.