STONE: Self-supervised tonality estimator @ ISMIR

Although deep neural networks can estimate the key of a musical piece, their supervision incurs a massive annotation effort. Against this shortcoming, we present STONE, the first self-supervised tonality estimator. The architecture behind STONE, named ChromaNet, is a convnet with octave equivalence which outputs a “key signature profile” (KSP) of 12 structured logits. First, we train ChromaNet to regress artificial pitch transpositions between any two unlabeled musical excerpts from the same audio track, as measured as cross-power spectral density (CPSD) within the circle of fifths (CoF). We observe that this self-supervised pretext task leads KSP to correlate with tonal key signature. Based on this observation, we extend STONE to output a structured KSP of 24 logits, and introduce supervision so as to disambiguate major versus minor keys sharing the same key signature. Applying different amounts of supervision yields semi-supervised and fully supervised tonality estimators: i.e., Semi-TONEs and Sup-TONEs. We evaluate these estimators on FMAK, a new dataset of 5489 real-world musical recordings with expert annotation of 24 major and minor keys. We find that Semi-TONE matches the classification accuracy of Sup-TONE with reduced supervision and outperforms it with equal supervision.

EMVD dataset: a dataset of extreme vocal distortion techniques used in heavy metal @ CBMI

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In this paper, we introduce the Extreme Metal Vocals Dataset, which comprises a collection of recordings of extreme vocal techniques performed within the realm of heavy metal music. The dataset consists of 760 audio excerpts of 1 second to 30 seconds long, totaling about 100 min of audio material, roughly composed of 60 minutes of distorted voices and 40 minutes of clear voice recordings. These vocal recordings are from 27 different singers and are provided without accompanying musical instruments or post-processing effects. The distortion taxonomy within this dataset encompasses four distinct distortion techniques and three vocal effects, all performed in different pitch ranges. Performance of a state-of-the-art deep learning model is evaluated for two different classification tasks related to vocal techniques, demonstrating the potential of this resource for the audio processing community.