"For in all the world there is nothing to equal the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the writings are Holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies." Such was the vision of the exalted importance of the Song of Songs as purportedly expressed by Rabbi Aqiba at the Council of Jamnia (ca. 90 A.D.). According to tradition, Aqiba's speech helped confirm the Song's plac...

30 second-snippets from 37 songs have been automatically extracted. All phonemes from this pieces have been manually labeled. The considered genre was popular music. 21 songs have been performed by male singers. 16 songs have been performed by female singers. Altogether 2244 phonemes have been manually labeled and can be used by the system. Only 15 voiced phonemes have been distinguished, becau...

In audio based music similarity, a well known effect is the existence of hubs, i.e. songs which appear similar to many other songs without showing any meaningful perceptual similarity. We verify that this effect also exists in very large databases (> 250000 songs) and that it even gets worse with growing size of databases. By combining different aspects of audio similarity we are able to reduce...

This paper presents Musimage, a novel system which displays pictures according to the songs being played at the same time. By using the interface the user selects the songs to be played, but the pictures are automatically selected. For each song to be played, the system selects a set of pictures, according to various criteria corresponding to some features of the song. In this sense, the pictur...

How the brain learns and generates temporal sequences is a fundamental issue in neuroscience. The production of birdsongs, a process which involves complex learned sequences, provides researchers with an excellent biological model for this topic. The Bengalese finch in particular learns a highly complex song with syntactical structure. The nucleus HVC (HVC), a premotor nucleus within the avian ...