EVENT SYNCHRONOUS MUSIC THUMBNAILS: EXPERIMENTS

The paper presents a recently introduced method for the generation of Music Thumbnails , an active field of research. The method aims to the construction of short music pieces, listening to which one can acquire partial knowledge or, at least, perceive the general flavor of the music content of the whole piece. Therefore, the introduced method should have its relevance from a psychoacoustical view-point, giving the opportunity of listening to a brief summary of the piece itself or of one of its parts. This will allow for enhanced navigation in large databases of music, where the thumbnail will give the flavor of the basic timbre features of the piece: only if it is of his/her interest the listener will proceed to acquire further acoustical details in order to confirm its choice. For this purpose, the method will be able to extract from a long piece of music common features that will be “condensed” in a shorter extract. Our method is synchronous with the basic phrase timing of the piece and it is therefore referred to as the Event Synchronous Thumbnailing (EST). Additionally, the method can be used as a means to navigate in large acoustical databases using thumbnailing for the purpose of collecting musical pieces having similar timbre flavors. The EST is therefore acting as a timbre signature to be searched for in the database.