Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter V
Identifying Saxophonists from
Their Playing Styles
Rafael Ramirez
Pompeu Fabra University, Spain
aBstract
We describe a novel approach to the task of identifying performers from their playing styles. We in-
vestigate how professional Jazz saxophonists express and communicate their view of the musical and
emotional content of musical pieces and how to use this information in order to automatically identify
performers. We study deviations of parameters such as pitch, timing, amplitude and timbre both at an
internote level and at an intranote level. Our approach to performer identification consists of establish-
ing a performer dependent mapping of internote features to a repertoire of inflections characterized by
intranote features. We present and discuss some results of our approach and comment on future trends
in this exciting research area.
IntroductIon
retrieval has been mainly based on text, and the
approaches to textual information retrieval have
been transferred into music information retrieval.
However, music contents and text contents are of
a very different nature which very often makes
textual information retrieval unsatisfactory in a
musical context. It has been widely recognized
that music retrieval techniques should incorporate
high-level semantic music information.
In this chapter we focus on the task of identi-
fying performers from their playing style using
high-level semantic descriptors extracted from
A key challenge in the area of music informa-
tion, given the explosion of online music and the
rapidly expanding digital music collections, is
the development of efficient and reliable music
search and retrieval systems. One of the main
deficiencies of current music search and retrieval
systems is the semantic gap between the simplicity
of the content descriptors that can be currently
extracted automatically and the semantic richness
in music information. Conventional information
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