Abstract:

This paper describes SmartMusicKIOSK, a new music-playback interface for trial listening. Traditionally in music stores, customers often search out the chorus or ``hook'' of a song by repeatedly pressing the fast-forward button, rather than passively listening to the music. This activity is not well-supported by current technology. This research achieves a function for jumping to the chorus section and other key parts of a song, plus a function for visualizing song structure. These functions eliminate the hassle of searching for the chorus and make it easier for a listener to find desired parts of a song, thereby facilitating an active listening experience. This interface, which enables a listener to look for a section of interest by interactively changing the playback position, is useful not only for trial listening but also for more general purposes in selecting and using music. The proposed functions are achieved through an automatic audio-based chorus-section detection method that can detect all the chorus sections by analyzing relationships between various repeated sections in a song. It can also detect modulated chorus sections by introducing an acoustic similarity that enables modulated repetition to be judged correctly. The results of implementing this method in SmartMusicKIOSK have demonstrated its usefulness.