Source Separation Using Dilated Time-Frequency DenseNet for Music Identification in Broadcast Contents

We propose a source separation architecture using dilated time-frequency DenseNet for background music identification of broadcast content. We apply source separation techniques to the mixed signals of music and speech. For the source separation purpose, we propose a new architecture to add a time-frequency dilated convolution to the conventional DenseNet in order to effectively increase the receptive field in the source separation scheme. In addition, we apply different convolutions to each frequency band of the spectrogram in order to reflect the different frequency characteristics of the low- and high-frequency bands. To verify the performance of the proposed architecture, we perform singing-voice separation and music-identification experiments. As a result, we confirm that the proposed architecture produces the best performance in both experiments because it uses the dilated convolution to reflect wide contextual information.

Connecting chord progressions with specific pieces of music

Musicians can conceptualize harmony in terms of its connection to specific pieces of music. However, research appears to indicate that harmony plays a relatively unimportant role in music identification tasks. The present study examines the ability of listeners of varying levels of musical expertise to identify music from chord progressions. Participants were asked to identify well-known classical and pop/rock pieces from their chord progressions, which were recorded using either piano tones or Shepard tones and were played at six transpositional levels. Although musical training and invariance of surface melodic and rhythmic features were found to have an advantageous effect on the identification task, even some non-musicians were able to identify music from chord progressions in conditions of low invariance of surface features. Implications of these results for our understanding of how listeners mentally represent and remember harmony are discussed.