Active Music Listening Interfaces Based on Signal Processing

This paper introduces our research aimed at building "active music listening interfaces". This research approach is intended to enrich end-users' music listening experiences by applying music-understanding technologies based on signal processing. Active music listening is a way of listening to music through active interactions. We have developed seven interfaces for active music listening, such as interfaces for skipping sections of no interest within a musical piece while viewing a graphical overview of the entire song structure, for displaying virtual dancers or song lyrics synchronized with the music, for changing the timbre of instrument sounds in compact-disc recordings, and for browsing a large music collection to encounter interesting musical pieces or artists. These interfaces demonstrate the importance of music-understanding technologies and the benefit they offer to end users. Our hope is that this work will help change music listening into a more active, immersive experience.

1. INTRODUCTION

People who can actively interact with music have traditionally been considered musicians, whether composers, singers, or instrument performers, in the sense that “actively” implies the creation of mu-sic. On the other hand, ordinary people have been just listeners who could interact with music only passively by, for example, appreciating music, hearing background music, or listening to a music program on radio or TV. In the past, before it became possible to record the audio signals of music, non-musicians could only listen to live performances. Then, when the recording of music to audio storage media became a reality, some people started interacting with music in more active ways. For example, they could specify the playback order of musical pieces on an audio cassette tape or recordable compact disc, pursue high audio-playback quality (high fidelity), or adjust frequency characteristics by using graphic equalizers or simple tone controls (boost or cut) for bass and treble.