Armonique: a framework for Web audio archiving, searching, and metadata extraction

Armonique is a Web2 framework for the management of audio material, including searching, archiving, and metadata extraction. It allows users to navigate large audio collections based solely on the similarity of the audio content itself, as opposed to metadata generated from human beings (e.g., musicologists and listener preferences). This framework allows new material to be added easily into an existing archive as it automatically extracts metadata. This is accomplished through hundreds of metrics based on power laws. Results from experiments with human subjects indicate that power-law metrics correlate with aspects of human emotion and aesthetics. The main advantages of this approach are that (a) it requires no human pre-processing, and (b) it allows discovery of similar songs that musicologists may miss (e.g., cross-style) or that are rarely listened to (i.e., no listener ratings). These results are by no means complete, but they suggest a powerful, automated alternative (or complement) to existing practices involving humans.