Music Technology Seminar (MUMT621)

Music Information Acquisition, Preservation, and Retrieval


Outline for Winter 2025

ISMIR Submission deadlines: Abstract: 21 March 2025 (topics), Full paper: 28 March 2025

01/07  
01/14

 

01/21

Slide or HTML presentation I (10 min)

  • Kun: POP 909 Dataset
  • Mai Lyn: ORCH.A.R.D.
  • John: CCARH: Digital Resources for Musicology
  • Liam: MetaBrainz Databases
  • Yu Chia: Lakh MIDI, Million Song, and Slakh Datasets
01/28
  • Classifiers (genre, instrument, mood, performer, composer, rhythm, beat tracking, etc.)

Slide or HTML presentation I

  • Nikki: Musipedia
  • Danijela: Freesound
  • Michael: CompMusic
  • David: MusicNet
  • Alex: Weimar Jazz Database

 

02/04

Slide presentation II (12 min)

  • Mai Lyn: Ogg Vorbis
  • Nikki: AIFF
  • John: Metadata in audio files and MEI
  • Kun: ABC notation

 

02/11

Slide-based presentation II 

  • Yu Chia: MusicXML (online)
  • Danijela: WAV/WMA
  • Michael: Standard MIDI File
  • David: MP3
  • Liam: MEI
  • Alex: FLAC

 

02/18

Slide-based presentation III (12 min)

  • Alex: GMM
  • Mai Lyn: CNN
  • David: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection
02/25

Slide-based presentation III 

  • Yu Chia: LSTM
  • Nikki: RNN
  • Danijela: Decision Trees (ID3 and C4.5)
  • John: Random Forest
  • Liam: Gradient Boosting

 

03/04
  • Study Week: No class

 

03/11

Slide-based presentation III 

  • Kun: Transformers
  • Michael: HMM

Slide-based presentation IV (12 min)

  • David: Music genre classification
  • Yu Chia: Pattern descoverry (form)
  • John: jSymbolic

03/18

Slide-based presentation IV 

  • Liam: Music emotion recognition
  • Michael: Timbre/instrument recognition
  • Alex: Jazz trio transcription using source separation
  • Mai Lyn: Acoustic individual identification
  • Nikki: Piano music transcription

03/25

Evaluation of MIR: MIREX

Slide-based presentation IV 

  • Danijela: Pitch tracking
  • Kun: Audio beat tracking

Slide-based presentation V (10–12 min)

  • Alex: Harmonic Similarity in Jazz
  • Liam: Performer Identification

Submit a draft of the final project proposal (1–2 pages) plus a partial bibliography

04/01

Slide-based presentation V 

  • Dave: Timbre Recognition
  • Danijela: SOMAX2
  • Nikki: Overview of Accessible Digital Musical Instruments
  • Yu Chia: OMR for Contemporary Notation
  • John: IIIF and Distribution of Music Manuscripts and Prints
  • Michael: FluCoMa’s Data Analysis
  • Mai Lyn: Diversity and Serendipity in Music Recommendation Systems
  • Kun: Text/Audio LLM-based Music Analysis Research

 

04/08

Final project presentations (8 min)

  • Danijela: Comparing SOMAX2 and DICY2: Machine Listening in Generative Music Systems
  • Mai Lyn: Investigating Diversity Evaluation Methods for Recommender Systems
  • Yu Chia: OMR for Contemporary Notation: An Exploratory Evaluation of Commercial Tools
  • Alex: Evolution of Swing Ratio Over a Solo
  • Liam:Teaching LLMs Music Theory with In-Context Learning and Chain-of-Thought Prompting: Pedagogical Strategies for Machines
  • David: Contrastive Learning and Information-Theoretic Objective for the Pruning of Audio Datasets
  • Kun: High-Resolution Piano Pedal Detection
  • Michael: Feature Extraction in Music Information Retrieval: A FluCoMa-Centric Literature Review
  • John: Exploring 19th-Century Mexican Music through IIIF and AI
  • Nikki: Breaking Barriers in Accessible Digital Musical Instruments: Machine Learning in Action!

Submit the final project proposal (1–2 pages) with a full bibliography

Assignments

Assignment #1 (Due 01/21) 4%


Assignment #2 (Due 02/04) 6% Slide-based presentation II (12 min)
  • Slide-based presentation of audio file formats: AIFF, WAV/WMA, Opus (Ogg Vorbis), Lossless formats (FLAC), etc.; MPEG formats: MPEG1 (MP3), MPEG4 (AAC), MPEG7, & MPEG21; symbolic file formats: MEI, MusicXML, MIDI, etc., or audio compression techniques. Submit the slides as a PDF file.
  • Annotated bibliography (short summary and evaluation) as a PDF file (use links, if avialable) (Chicago style, Documentation II: Author-Date References, 17th edition) of the presentation topic.

Assignment #3 (Due 2/18) 10% Slide-based presentation III (12 min)
  • Slide-based presentation of review of topics related to classifiers, e.g.: Feature extraction (audio or symbolic), Feature selection (with Genetic Algorithms) Neural Networks (shallow, deep, CNN, RNN, LSTM, Transformers, etc.), Support Vector Machines, Decision Trees (ID3 & C4.5), Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, Gaussian Mixture Models, Hidden Markov Models, AdaBoost, and Dynamic Programming; include music information retrieval applications. Submit the slids as a PDF file.
  • Written summary (2–3 pages, single spaced, single or double columns, 1" margins) plus an annotated bibliography (Chicago style, Documentation II: Author-Date References,17th edition) of the presentation topic.

Assignment #4 (Due 03/11) 10% Slide-based presentation IV (12 min)
  • Slide-based presentation on topics of transcription, recognition, annotation, and classification. It may include general review of transcription systems (monophonic, polyphonic, separation), Beat-box transcription, singing transcription, beat/tempo tracking using audio, beat/tempo tracking using MIDI, diarization, Goto’ works, ealtme pitch tracking, piano music transcription, timbre / instrument recognition, genre classification, structural analy’sis, performer identification, music emotion recognition, review of a component of jMIR, etc. Submit the slides as a PDF file.
  • Written summary (2–3 pages) with an extensive bibliography (Chicago style, Documentation II: Author-Date References, 17th edition), which should include practically all significant papers on the subject. You do not need to annotated them but should reference each one of them in the summary paper.

Assignment #5 (Due 03/25) 10% Slide-based presentation V (10–12 min)
  • Slide-based presentation on review of topics related to similarity (melody, harmony, timbre, genre, etc.), query systems, recommendation / playlist systems, historical overviews in MIR, rcomputational musicology / ethnomusicology, or exploratory research on topics related to your final project. Submit the slides as a PDF file.
  • Written summary (2–3 pages) plus an extensive bibliography (Chicago style, Documentation II: Author-Date References: 17th edition) of the presentation topic.

Assignment #6 (Due 03/25) 5%

  • A draft of the final project proposal (1–2 pages), including a tentative title, subgoals, plus a partial bibliography (Chicago style, Documentation II: Author-Date References, 17th edition).

Assignment #7 (Due 04/08) 5%

  • Final project presentation describing what you intend to do (5–8 min). Submit the slids as a PDF file.
  • Final project proposal (1–2 pages) with the title and a full bibliography (Chicago style, Documentation II: Author-Date References, 17th edition).

Final project (Due 05/02) 40%
  • Software project with description (2–3 pages) (Repository on Github) (ISMIR style)

or

Improving writing skills for McGill graduate students: Graphos

Reading list

Participants

  • Alex Chiriboga
  • Kun Fang
  • Danijela Kos
  • Yu Chia Kuo
  • John Lazos
  • David Piazza
  • Liam Pond
  • Nikki Puchkov
  • Mai Lyn Puittinen
  • Michael Zajner
Created: 2004-01-02 Modified: Ichiro Fujinaga <
McGill Crest