Given the recent explosion in the use of folksonomies to describe digital objects, it is important to study how users tag items in order to design online systems that best meet their needs. This small-scale study explored what music information facets users of the social music website last.fm might consider when assigning emotion-based tags to describe songs, as well as whether a small group of...

Common approaches to creating playlists are to randomly shuffle a collection (e.g. iPod shuffle) or manually select songs. In this paper we present and evaluate heuristics to adapt playlists automatically given a song to start with (seed song) and immediate user feedback. Instead of rich metadata we use audio-based similarity. The user gives feedback by pressing a skip button if the user dislik...

Many interesting pieces of music violate established structures or rules of their genre on purpose. These songs can be very atypical in their interior structure and their different parts might actually allude to entirely different other songs or genres. We present a query-by-example-based user interface that shows songs related to the one currently playing. This relation is not based on overall...

Cover song identification is a trivial problem for human beings. A human can easily identify whether a song is a cover of another or not, without using much effort. However, cover song identification is not an easy task for machines, as the numerical audio data differs significantly. Since a major goal of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence is to make machines mimic human-like cognitio...

Automatically generated playlists have become an important medium for accessing and exploring large collections of music. In this paper, we present a probabilistic model for generating coherent playlists by embedding songs and social tags in a unified metric space. We show how the embedding can be learned from example playlists, providing the metric space with a probabilistic meaning for song/s...

In many species, individuals discriminate among sexual signals of conspecific populations in the contexts of mate choice and male-male competition. Differences in signals among populations (geographical variation) are in part the result of signal evolution within populations (temporal variation). Understanding the relative effect of temporal and geographical signal variation on signal salience ...

With the popularity of song search applications on Internet and mobile phone, large scale similar song search has been attracting more and more attention in recent years. Similar songs are created by altering the volume levels, timing, amplification, or layering other songs on top of an original song. Given the large scale of songs uploaded on the Internet, it is demanding but challenging to id...

In mammals, complex songs are uncommon and few studies have examined song composition or the order of elements in songs, particularly with respect to regional and individual variation. In this study we examine how syllables and phrases are ordered and combined, ie "syntax", of the song of Tadarida brasiliensis, the Brazilian free-tailed bat. Specifically, we test whether phrase and song composi...

We conducted a tutoring experiment to determine whether female brown-headed cowbirds (Molothrus ater) would attend to vocalizations of other females and use those cues to influence their own preferences for male courtship songs. We collected recordings of male songs that were unfamiliar to the subject females and paired half of the songs with female chatter vocalizations-vocalizations that fema...

Closely related species of songbirds often show large differences in song syntax, suggesting that major innovations in syntax must sometimes arise and spread. Here we examine the response of male and female swamp sparrows, Melospiza georgiana, to an innovation in song syntax produced by males of this species. Young male swamp sparrows that have been exposed to tutor songs with experimentally in...