Songle: MIR Crowd Sourcing

Sun, Oct 30, 2011 One-minute read

Songle is the new impressive application by Masataka Goto that presented this past weekend in ISMIR 2011. There has been a lot of buzz about crowd sourcing for Music Information Retrieval (MIR) lately.

What Goto has published is a tool to display automatically extracted chords, segments, pitch, onsets, beats, of any uploaded song. Not only that, but it also makes it easy to edit the annotations yourself, making this app a ultimate tool towards a crowd sourcing ground truth for MIR. Even though the catalogue of songs is still -disappointingly- small, and there are still some issues with its interface (I get an error when I try to sign up with my OpenID!), I think this application has the power to make a (small?) MIR revolution using the power of crowd sourcing in the shortcoming future.

In this picture we can see the extracted vocal melody (red lines), chords, parts of the song (blue and orange tracks), onsets and beats (triangles on the bottom), … I’m simply amazed right now. What a great piece of software!