PSNE Aug P4 Editorial

5/8/10

17:22

Page 4

Picture by John Tuffen

4 news & welcome

www.prosoundnewseurope.com  August 2010
UNITED KINGDOM/JAPAN

Future listening
AES London Convention speech looks at ways toenhance music understanding. Simon Duff reports

Editor’s comment
Dave Robinson

AS PSNE GOES TO press, on this day,
5 August 2010, it seems we’ve finally got
some of the info we’ve been after for,well, months and months.
If you’re a channel 69 wireless user,
you’re going to receive compensation
when you come to buy your new kit. Ifyou’re not on 69 now, you get nothing.
According to campaign group Save Our
Sound UK, this represents 6% of therelevant frequencies, and is far from what
the government is calling a “generous”
funding scheme for reallocation. “To callthis package ‘generous’ is an abuse of theEnglish language,” to quote SOS UK.
So can we find anything positive fromthis financial body-blow to the PMSE
sector? Maybe. Today, 5 August, Ofcom
revealed that “roughly 55%” of the costto eligible ch69 users will be reimbursed.
SOS UK hurriedly put a statement together
at PSNE’s request, but didn’t want to bedrawn into making concrete quotes. And
rightly so: they need time to examine thesmall print.
But let’s look at it this way: if you
received a substantial discount when you
purchased your wireless systems, and thegovernment are compensating at 55%,
then you may get most of your cash back.
Which is better than a kick in the teeth.
Here’s something very important tobear in mind though: it would seem there
is a certain element of a ‘first come, firstserved’ structure to the scheme, so don’t
dawdle on 23 September: get yourapplication in smartish. Meanwhile, Ofcom
have agreed to let PSNE readers know
exactly what’s involved: so make sure you
check out the feature next month. Q

Masataka Goto, leader of the Media Interaction
Group at the National Institute of Advanced
Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan,
gave this year’s keynote speech at AES Londonin May.
The title of his talk was ‘Music Listening in theFuture’. Goto’s mission is to help shape a future
where music listening for a general public can be
more active, more immersive, richer and deeper byusing music-understanding technologies.
He explains: “Music-understanding technologies based on signal processing have thepotential to enable new ways of listening tomusic for everyone. At the AIST we have developed nine different types of Active Music
Listening interfaces, working with MP3 files running on PC, to demonstrate how end users canbenefit from new technology. Active Music
Listening aims at allowing the user to better
understand the music they listen to and to actively influence the listening experience.”
SmartMusicKIOSK is a computer programmethat has a chorus-search function enabling users
to access directly their favourite part of a song (andto skip others) while viewing a visual representation of its musical structure with the focus on chorus (‘hook’) sections. Technically the system
automatically finds chorus sections by utilising a
new signal processing method to analyse repetition of chord progression and melody line. With apatent approved on SmartMusicKIOSK in Japan,
the US and Korea, Goto is in the process of seeking company partners in the audio world andbelieves that users could be computer consumersas well as those in the mobile devices marketplace.
Another area of development is LyricSynchroniser, which can automatically synchronise song lyrics to a recording and highlightthe phrase being sung. A user can easily follow
the current playback position and click on a wordin the lyrics to listen to it. Goto has invented amethod that allows users to extract vocals fromexisting stereo or mono files, and, with
Hiromasa Fujihara and Hiroshi G Okuno, hasdeveloped a method that synchronises such
extracted vocals with lyrics.
“Given polyphonic sound mixtures takenfrom available music recordings, our interfaces

Masataka Goto at AES London

thus enrich end-users’ music listening experiences,and open up new ways of music listening inthe future.”
Music playback visualisation has also beenrealised. Animated synchronisation with music is
made possible via a program called Cindy, in effecta virtual dancing tool driven by beat tracking. It
can automatically synchronise motions and positions of computer-graphics dancers with musicalbeats. Users can enjoy different dance motion
moods by changing them during music playback
through pressing buttons.
Further software includes a music touch-up
program called Drumix, developed with
Kazuyoshi Yoshii and Okuno. This is an audio
player with real-time drum-editing functions
allowing users to change and edit the volume

and timbre of drum sounds in existing music
recordings and add new drum patterns during
music playback. These functions can be achievedby an automatic drum sound detection method
for polyphonic music recordings. VocaListener,
developed with Tomoyasu Nakano, similarly
aims at allowing users to change the timbre ofexisting vocal recordings. It is a singing synthesis system that automatically estimates pitchand dynamics parameters of commercial singing
synthesisers such as Yamaha’s Vocaloid sothat the synthesised voice can mimic an existing vocal recording. Although the voice comesfrom singing synthesisers, it is human-like andvery natural.
The last interface that Goto discussed during the lecture is Musicream, developed withTakayuki Goto. In essence, this is a discovery
system developed with the intention of being
connected to a flat rate, all you can hear music
subscription service in the future. “The idea
behind Musicream is to see if we can break freefrom stereotyped thinking of how music playback interfaces must be based on lists of song
titles and artist names. Instead of listing up
titles, disc icons representing music pieces flow
one after another from virtual supply taps, andthe user can select a disc and listen to it. By
dragging a favourite disc in the flow, the user
can easily pick out other similar pieces to createa playlist.”
Located at Tsukuba Science City, just outside Tokyo, the AIST is the biggest national
research institute in Japan. Goto leads
researchers at the Media Interaction Group ofAIST. At present most interfaces that have beendeveloped are not commercially available but
the group believes they can stimulate a new typeof music technology industry and intends
licensing its core technologies and patents tocompanies in the near future.
Goto is clearly determined and passionate
about the possibilities that he is trying to open
up. He concludes: “If listeners want to improvetheir music-understanding listening ability,
methods to realise this have not yet been established. We aim to change this. Looking to thefuture I hope to develop new technologies
around music-understanding ability training
interfaces and singing information processing.
It will involve areas that go further than everbefore in combining signal processing andmachine learning technologies and data fromthe internet. That is my next big research area.
It will be amazing!” Q
http://staff.aist.go.jp/m.goto/

h AES Convention 129 is being held in San Francisco
from 4-7 November.