AudioLabs - Towards Modeling and Decomposing Loop-Based Electronic Music

Towards Modeling and Decomposing Loop-Based Electronic Music

This is the accompanying website for the paper:

Patricio López-Serrano, Christian Dittmar, and Meinard Müller
Towards Modeling and Decomposing Loop-Based Electronic Music
In Proceedings of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR): 502–508, 2016. PDF Demo

@inproceedings{LopezDM16_EDM_ISMIR,
author    = {Patricio L\'{o}pez-Serrano and Christian Dittmar and Meinard M{\"u}ller},
title     = {Towards Modeling and Decomposing Loop-Based Electronic Music},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference  ({ISMIR})},
address   = {New York, USA},
year      = {2016},
pages     = {502--508},
url-pdf   = {2016_LopezSerranoDM_DcomposingEDM_ISMIR_ePrint.pdf},
url-demo = {https://www.audiolabs-erlangen.de/resources/MIR/2016-ISMIR-EMLoop}
}

Abstract

Electronic Music (EM) is a popular family of genres which has increasingly received attention as a research subject in the field of MIR. A fundamental structural unit in EM are loops---audio fragments whose length can span several seconds. The devices commonly used to produce EM, such as sequencers and digital audio workstations, impose a musical structure in which loops are repeatedly triggered and overlaid. This particular structure allows new perspectives on well-known MIR tasks. In this paper we first review a prototypical production technique for EM from which we derive a simplified model. We then use our model to illustrate approaches for the following task: given a set of loops that were used to produce a track, decompose the track by finding the points in time at which each loop was activated. To this end, we repurpose established MIR techniques such as fingerprinting and non-negative matrix factor deconvolution.