Segmentation, Clustering, and Display in a Personal Audio Database for Musicians

Managing music audio databases for practicing musicians presents new and interesting challenges. We describe a systematic investigation to provide useful capabilities to musicians both in rehearsal and when practicing alone. Our goal is to allow musicians to automatically record, organize, and retrieve rehearsal (and other) audio to facilitate review and practice (for example, playing along with difficult passages). We introduce a novel music classification system based on Eigenmusic and Adaboost to separate rehearsal recordings into segments, an unsupervised clustering and alignment process to organize segments, and a digital music display interface that provides both graphical input and output in terms of conventional music notation.