Cuidado

Content-based Unified Interfaces and Descriptors for Audio/music Databases available Online

Introduction

CUIDADO is a project aiming the coordination, at the European level, of multi-disciplinary research on the description of sound and music contents as well as the promotion of new applications taking advantage of the progress of those works. The description of audiovisual contents, relatively unexplored as far as sound and music is concerned, is part of the process of the current MPEG-7 normalization, on which the Ircam and other Cuidado partners are actively participating. Indeed, the possibility to distribute very large databases, available online, makes it evident that the searching by musical and sound content built on pertinent description structures is an interesting matter. Moreover, those descriptors need as much as possible to be the result of automatic sound recording extracting procedures.

Work Description/Objectives

The work combines research and development on two corpus types:

-on the one hand sound samples, isolated sounds used by professionals of sound and music production; this work will have to lead to the realization of an application, the Sound Palette, used for the managing of sample databases and equiped with editing and control functions specified by high level criteria. Two versions are developed : the Online Sound Palette which is available online at Ircam and focuses on classification functions, research and navigation; the Offline Sound Palette, which is integrated into Creamware's Scope software for the PC, and includies sample search and editing functions;

-on the other hand recorded music parts where multiple points of view (performer, style, rhythm, timbre, etc.) have to be characterized in order to propose new navigation procedures. On the subject of the development of the Music Browser application, the project provides in particular the automatic generation of piece sequences (play-lists), of which the series follows different types of rules (stylistics, user's preferences, etc.). The automatic calculation of musical summaries, synthetisizing the structure of the pieces and allowing a quick navigation between their different parts, is also provided. At last, for musical performing rights organizations tools for automatic identification of musical parts are proposed allowing the control of illegal copies.

Project Details

Participants