Week 10: Audio similarity and transcription
Task 1: Similarity
Song similarity matrix
The first task was to compute a similarity matrix. In order to do so, the country tracks
were replaced with electronic tracks since that is one of the genres I am working with
in this project. Thus, two more electronic songs needed to be downloaded from the Free
Music Archive (EE7A – Fairground,
Synapsis – Seven). For both
the rock and classical genre, I replaced one of the example songs with the songs from
previous weeks.
In the matrix, tracks 0-3 are classical, 4-6 are rock and 7-9 are
electronic. Interestingly, one of the electronic tracks (track 8) is fairly similar to
the
classical tracks, with roughly 1.0 similarity score. Overall, if we look at the matrix,
we can see that the rock and electronic songs are more like each other than electronic
and classical songs.
Genre similarity plot
The genre similarity plot visualises the separation between the individual genres. The songs of a similar genre appear clustered together. As previously discussed, one of the electronic songs appears to be similar to the classical ones, therefore it is visualised in a close proximity to the classical genre cluster.
Task 2: Transcription
For this task I used the transcription created in MuseScore at the very beginning of the course and exported it as a wav file. This file was loaded into Sonic Visualiser, exported as MIDI and subsequently reopened in MuseScore which produced the transcription you can see below. There is a clear difference between the original composition and the transcribed version from both a sonic and a visual perspective. When I listened to both files in MuseScore, they sounded very different. Visually, they also appear to be different. If we inspect both notations more closely, we can see that the time signature differs, it is 4/4 in the original composition and 3/4 in the transcription. Additionally, the tempo marking is different, the transcribed version is faster (120 bpm). Finally, the transcribed version is in E flat whereas the original composition is in E major.
Original composition
Transcribed composition
