Music – Instruments – Electrical musical tone generation
Reexamination Certificate
2000-04-05
2001-05-01
Donels, Jeffrey (Department: 2837)
Music
Instruments
Electrical musical tone generation
C084S645000, C700S094000, C704SE21020
Reexamination Certificate
active
06225546
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
This invention relates generally to data analysis, and, more specifically to a techniques for summarizing audio data and for generating an audio summary useful to a user.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
An important problem in large-scale information organization and processing is the generation of a much smaller document that best summarizes an original digital document. For example, a movie clip may provide a good preview of the movie. A book review describes a book in a short and concise fashion. An abstract of a paper provides the main results of the paper without giving out the details. A biography tells the life story of a person without recording every single events of his/her life. The summarization as mentioned above are often carefully produced from the original document manually. However, in the era where a large volume of documents are made publicly available on mediums such as the Internet, the problem of automatic summarization has become increasingly important.
There are vast differences in techniques for summarizing documents of different types and content. For example, sampling and coarsening can be applied to digital images. One approach to generate a smaller but similar image from an original digital image is to keep every kth pixel in the image, and hence reduce an n by n image to an n/k by n/k image. Some smoothing operations can be applied to the smaller image to make the coarsened image more visually pleasing. Another approach is to apply an image compression technique, such as JPAG and MTAG, where the coefficients of less significant basis components are eliminated.
In contrast, text-document summarization is much harder to automate. A compressed text file is often unreadable. Various heuristics techniques have been developed. For example, Microsoft Word software examines frequently-used terms in a document and picks sentences that may be close to the main theme, however, the summarization so produced is not quite appealing.
Although numerous compression techniques exist for compressing audio data, these techniques, as well as the summarization techniques described above for graphic and/or text information, are not applicable to the summarization of musical compositions. Because of the highly sophisticated structure and sequence of a musical composition and the aspects of the compositions which are recognizable to the listener, the task of efficiently summarizing a musical composition presents a number of difficult challenges which have yet to be addressed in the prior art. Accordingly, a need exists for a way in which musical compositions in a variety of formats and/or styles may be summarized to create a brief summary of the common theme of the composition so as to be readily recognized by a listener.
A further need exists for a method and technique in which the structure and aspects of a musical composition may be broken down into the primitive components of the musical composition and repetitive patterns detected and a summarization generated from the patterns.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
This invention discloses a summarization system for music compositions which automatically analyzes a piece of music given in audio-format, MIDI data format, or the original score, and generates a hierarchical structure that summarizes the composition. The summarization data is then used to create an audio segment (thumbnail) which is useful in recognition of the musical piece. A key aspect of the invention is to use the structure information of the music piece to determine the main melody and use the main melody or a part thereof as the representative audio summary.
The inventive system utilizes the repetition nature of music compositions to automatically recognize the main melody theme segment of a given piece of music. In most music compositions, the melody repeats itself multiple number times in various close variations. A detection engine utilizes algorithms that model melody recognition and music summarization problems as various string processing problems and efficiently processes the problems. The inventive technique recognizes maximal length segments that have non-trivial repetitions in each track of the Musical Instrument Design Interface (MIDI) format of the musical piece. These segments are basic units of a music composition, and are the candidates for the melody in a music piece. The system then applies domain-specific music knowledge and rules to recognize the melody among other musical parts to build a hierarchical structure that summarizes a composition.
According to the invention, a method and system for generating audio summaries of musical pieces receives computer readable data representing the musical piece and generates therefrom an audio summary including the main melody of the musical piece. A component builder generates a plurality of composite and primitive components representing the structural elements of the musical piece and creates a hierarchical representation of the components. The most primitive components, representing notes within the composition, are examined to determine repetitive patterns within the composite components. A melody detector examines the hierarchical representation of the components and uses algorithms to detect which of the repetitive patterns is the main melody of the composition. Once the main melody is detected, the segment of the musical data containing the main melody is provided in one or more formats. Musical knowledge rules representing specific genres of musical styles may be used to assist the component builder and melody detector in determining which primitive component patterns are the most likely candidates for the main melody.
According to one aspect of the present invention, a method of generating an audio summarization of a musical piece having a main melody, the method comprising: receiving computer-readable data representing the musical piece; generating from the computer-readable data a plurality of components representing structural elements of the musical piece; detecting the main melody among the generated components; and generating an audio summary containing a representation of the detected main melody.
According to a second aspect of the invention, an apparatus for generating an audio summarization of a musical piece having a main melody comprises: an analyzer configured to receive computer-readable data representing the musical piece; a component builder configured to generate from the computer-readable data a plurality of components representing structural elements of the musical piece; a detection engine configured to detect the main melody among the generated components; and a generator configured to create an audio summary containing a representation of the detected main melody.
According to a third aspect of the invention, a computer program product for use with a computer apparatus comprises: analyzer program code configured to receive computer-readable data representing the musical piece; component builder program code configured to generate from the computer-readable data a plurality of components representing structural elements of the musical piece; detection engine program code configured to detect the main melody among the generated components; and generator program code configured to create an audio summary containing a representation of the detected main melody.
REFERENCES:
patent: 5179718 (1993-01-01), MacPhail
patent: 5286908 (1994-02-01), Jungleib
patent: 5467288 (1995-11-01), Fasciano et al.
patent: 5533902 (1996-07-01), Serra et al.
patent: 5536903 (1996-07-01), Kennedy
patent: 5553002 (1996-09-01), Dangelo et al.
patent: 5557424 (1996-09-01), Panizza
patent: 5574915 (1996-11-01), Lemon et al.
patent: 5585583 (1996-12-01), Owen
patent: 5604100 (1997-02-01), Perlin
patent: 5657221 (1997-08-01), Warman et al.
patent: 5715318 (1998-02-01), Hill et al.
patent: 5734119 (1998-03-01), France et al.
patent: 5736633 (1998-04-01), Aoki et al.
patent: 5736663 (1998-04-01), Aoki et al.
patent: 5739451 (1998-04-01), Winksy et al.
patent: 5757386 (1998-05-01), Ce
Kraft Reiner
Lu Qi
Teng Shang-Hua
Donels Jeffrey
International Business Machines - Corporation
Kudirka & Jobse LLP
LandOfFree
Method and apparatus for music summarization and creation of... does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this patent.
If you have personal experience with Method and apparatus for music summarization and creation of..., we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Method and apparatus for music summarization and creation of... will most certainly appreciate the feedback.
Profile ID: LFUS-PAI-O-2558460