ESSENTIA: an open-source library for sound and music analysis

Bogdanov, Dmitry; Wack, Nicolas; Gómez Gutiérrez, Emilia, 1975-; Gulati, Sankalp; Herrera Boyer, Perfecto, 1964-; Mayor, Oscar; Roma Trepat, Gerard; Salamon, Justin; Zapata González, José Ricardo; Serra, Xavier

doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2502081.2502229

ESSENTIA: an open-source library for sound and music analysis

Citation

Bogdanov D, Wack N, Gómez E, Gulati S, Herrera P, Mayor O, Roma G, Salamon J, Zapata JR, Serra X. ESSENTIA: an open-source library for sound and music analysis. In: MM'13. Proceedings of the 21st ACM international conference on Multimedia; 2013 Oct 21-25: Barcelona, Spain. New York: ACM; 2013. p. 855-8. DOI 10.1145/2502081.2502229

Abstract

We present Essentia 2.0, an open-source C++ library for audio analysis and audio-based music information retrieval released under the Affero GPL license. It contains an extensive collection of reusable algorithms which implement audio input/output functionality, standard digital signal processing blocks, statistical characterization of data, and a large set of spectral, temporal, tonal and high-level music descriptors. The library is also wrapped in Python and includes a number of predefined executable extractors for the available music descriptors, which facilitates its use for fast prototyping and allows setting up research experiments very rapidly. Furthermore, it includes a Vamp plugin to be used with Sonic Visualiser for visualization purposes. The library is cross-platform and currently supports Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows systems. Essentia is designed with a focus on the robustness of the provided music descriptors and is optimized in terms of the computational cost of the algorithms. The provided functionality, specifically the music descriptors included in-the-box and signal processing algorithms, is easily expandable and allows for both research experiments and development of large-scale industrial applications.