Audio Developer Conference

The current music production workflow, comprising recording, editing, mixing, and mastering music, requires a great deal of manual work for the sound engineer. This process needs to be streamlined and there exist technologies that can do this. This poster presents a project that aims to bring some recent advances in Music Information Retrieval (MIR) techniques to music production tools in order to bridge this gap. The work presented here comes from a Master’s thesis project from the Music Technology Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The goal of this project is to explore all areas in the music production workflow (with a focus on classical music) that could benefit from digital signal processing-based tools, to build and iterate on these tools, and to transform the tools into products that are beneficial and easy to use. We collaborated with the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) sound engineers to gather requirements for the project, which led to the identification of two potential tools: an automatic marking transfer (AMT) system and an audio search (AS) system. We have since then collaborated with other potential users for both AMT and AS tools, including sound engineers from radio stations in the Boston area. This has enabled us to identify additional workflows and finalize requirements for these tools. Based on these, we have created standalone applications for AMT and AS.

This poster will share the motivation for our work, the technical details of the design, implementation, and evaluation of AMT and AS, a demonstration of the tools, and future directions for this work.