Music information retrieval

Music information retrieval (MIR) is the interdisciplinary science of retrieving information from music. Those involved in MIR may have a background in academic musicology, psychoacoustics, psychology, signal processing, informatics, machine learning, optical music recognition, computational intelligence or some combination of these. MIR is being used by businesses and academics to categorize, manipulate and even create music. One of the classical MIR research topic is genre classification, which is categorizing music items into one of pre-defined genres such as classical, jazz, rock, etc. Mood classification, artist classification, instrument identification, and music tagging are also popular topics. Several recommender systems for music already exist, but surprisingly few are based upon MIR techniques, instead making use of similarity between users or laborious data compilation. Pandora, for example, uses experts to tag the music with particular qualities such as "female singer" or "strong bassline". Many other systems find users whose listening history is similar and suggests unheard music to the users from their respective collections. MIR techniques for similarity in music are now beginning to form part of such systems. Music source separation is about separating original signals from a mixture audio signal. Instrument recognition is about identifying the instruments involved in music. Various MIR systems have been developed that can separate music into its component tracks without access to the master copy. In this way e.g. karaoke tracks can be created from normal music tracks, though the process is not yet perfect owing to vocals occupying some of the same frequency space as the other instruments. Automatic music transcription is the process of converting an audio recording into symbolic notation, such as a score or a . This process involves several audio analysis tasks, which may include multi-pitch detection, onset detection, duration estimation, instrument identification, and the extraction of harmonic, rhythmic or melodic information.