Music Informatics and Auditory Perception
Today, computers and the Internet are commonly used for all aspects of music culture from production to listening. When a typical online music database contains 5 million songs, new computer tools are needed for characterizing, and indexing music audio. This is the focus of the new research field Music Information Retrieval (MIR).
In an earlier project, a new approach was successfully tested using perceptually defined features for describing music in a four-layered approach with audio, low-level features, mid-level perceptual features, and semantic descriptions. A major focus in this area is to develop computational models for predicting the perceptual features using signal-processing techniques in combination with machine learning methods.