Perfecto Herrera will give a talk at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science in Leipzig, Germany, entitled "Automatic music content description: from signals to symbols." The talk will be on Wednesday 19th of December at 3pm.

The talk will present and discuss some of the current problems and methodologies for extracting, from an audio music file, "objective" representations of its musical and sonic content. The extracted descriptors belong to different levels of abstraction and help to characterize different musical facets. Even though they do not provide a musical "transcription", several music classification problems (e.g., genre classification, version detection, mood classification, key and mode detection, etc.) can be addressed with a high degree of success. Therefore, commercial applications such as music recommenders, music+fitness systems or radio airplay monitoring, can be built on top of them. Even though this apparent success, it is clear to music technologists that knowledge about how human brains process musical stimuli, incomplete as it is at this point, may help to guide the inception of improved descriptors and music content processing algorithms. At the same time, some of our technologies can be useful in the preparation and analysis of music psychology and neuroscience experiments.

More information on the Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science: MPI CBS