J. Stephen Downie

Bio: J. Stephen Downie is an academic researcher from University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. The author has contributed to research in topics: Music information retrieval & Digital library. The author has an hindex of 30, co-authored 164 publications receiving 4135 citations. Previous affiliations of J. Stephen Downie include University of Western Ontario & National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

Beyond error tolerance: finding thematic similarities in music digital libraries

Abstract: Current Music Information Retrieval (MIR) systems focus on melody based retrieval with some tolerance for user errors in the melody specification. The system described here presents a novel method for theme retrieval: A theme is described as a list of musical events, containing melody and harmony features, which must be presented in a given order and within a given time frame. The system retrieves musical phrases that fit the description. A system of this type could serve musicians and listeners who wish to discover thematically similar phrases in music digital libraries. The prototype and underlying model have been tested on midi sequences of music by W.A. Mozart and have shown good performance results.

Searching musical audio datasets by a batch of multi-variant tracks

Abstract: Multi-variant music tracks are those audio tracks of a particular song which are sung and recorded by different people (i.e., cover songs). As music social clubs grow on the Internet, more and more people like to upload music recordings onto such music social sites to share their own home-produced albums and participate in Internet singing contests. Therefore it is very important to explore a computer-assisted evaluation tool to detect these audio-based multi-variant tracks. In this paper we investigate such a task: the original track of a song is embedded in datasets, with a batch of multi-variant audio tracks of this song as input, our retrieval system returns an ordered list by similarity and indicates the position of relevant audio track. To help process multi-variant audio tracks, we suggest a semantic indexing framework and propose the Federated Features (FF) scheme to generate the semantic summarization of audio feature sequences. The conjunction of federated features with three typical similarity searching schemes, K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH), and Exact Euclidian LSH (E2LSH), is evaluated. From these findings, a computer-assisted evaluation tool for searching multi-variant audio tracks was developed to search over large musical audio datasets.

A Cross-Cultural Study on the Mood of K-POP Songs.

Abstract: Prior research suggests that music mood is one of the most important criteria when people look for music—but the perception of mood may be subjective and can be influenced by many factors including the listeners’ cultural background. In recent years, the number of studies of music mood perceptions by various cultural groups and of automated mood classification of music from different cultures has been increasing. However, there has yet to be a well-established testbed for evaluating cross-cultural tasks in Music Information Retrieval (MIR). Moreover, most existing datasets in MIR consist mainly of Western music and the cultural backgrounds of the annotators were mostly not taken into consideration or were limited to one cultural group. In this study, we built a collection of 1,892 K-pop (Korean Pop) songs with mood annotations collected from both Korean and American listeners, based on three different mood models. We analyze the differences and similarities between the mood judgments of the two listener groups, and propose potential MIR tasks that can be evaluated on this dataset.

Toward accessible course content: challenges and opportunities for libraries and information systems

Abstract: The population of students with disabilities in post-secondary institutions is significant and rising. The U.S. Department of Education reports that 11% of students, or more than two million students, in post-secondary education report having a disability. Providing accessible versions of materials for courses is a core service of disability-services offices in schools. Finding, obtaining, or generating accessible course content is a challenging process for disability-services providers at institutions ranging from community colleges to research universities, many of which receive hundreds of individualized requests for content each semester. Although a range of sources and services to assist in this process have emerged, they are insufficient and inefficient because they keep people from working together on a complex, shared problem. In the summer of 2015, we conducted a qualitative study of the challenges facing disability services providers in U.S. post-secondary institutions, in order to design and implement information systems that would enable large-scale sharing of locally improved, accessible course content with qualified students in the U.S. This paper reports on the subset of our findings that addresses challenges to providing, sharing, and reusing accessible digital content. Our findings suggest that there are substantial opportunities for the LIS and library communities to apply our expertise to this gap in information services for an expanding population of students.

Chopin Early Editions: Construction and Usage of Online Digital Scores

Abstract: The University of Chicago Library has digitized a collection of 19 century music scores. The online collection is generated programmatically from the scanned images and human-created descriptive and structural metadata, encoded as METS objects, and delivered using the Greenstone Digital Library software. Use statistics are analyzed and possible future directions for the collection are discussed.

Content-based multimedia information retrieval: State of the art and challenges

Abstract: Extending beyond the boundaries of science, art, and culture, content-based multimedia information retrieval provides new paradigms and methods for searching through the myriad variety of media all over the world. This survey reviews 100p recent articles on content-based multimedia information retrieval and discusses their role in current research directions which include browsing and search paradigms, user studies, affective computing, learning, semantic queries, new features and media types, high performance indexing, and evaluation techniques. Based on the current state of the art, we discuss the major challenges for the future.

Looking for Information: A Survey of Research on Information Seeking, Needs and Behavior

Abstract: Abbreviated Contents Figures and Tables Preface Introduction and Examples Concepts Relevant to Information Behavior Models, Paradigms, and Theories in the Study of Information Behavior Methods for Studying Information Behavior Research Results and Reflections Appendix: Glossary Appendix: Questions for Discussion and Application References Index

Invisible colleges : diffusion of knowledge in scientific communities

Abstract: No wonder you activities are, reading will be always needed. It is not only to fulfil the duties that you need to finish in deadline time. Reading will encourage your mind and thoughts. Of course, reading will greatly develop your experiences about everything. Reading invisible colleges diffusion of knowledge in scientific communities is also a way as one of the collective books that gives many advantages. The advantages are not only for you, but for the other peoples with those meaningful benefits.

Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation

Abstract: A theory of expectations is used to explain how music evokes various emotions for readers interested in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology as well as music. The psychological theory of expectation that David Huron proposes in "Sweet Anticipation" grew out of experimental efforts to understand how music evokes emotions. These efforts evolved into a general theory of expectation that will prove informative to readers interested in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology as well as those interested in music. The book describes a set of psychological mechanisms and illustrates how these mechanisms work in the case of music. All examples of notated music can be heard on the Web. Huron proposes that emotions evoked by expectation involve five functionally distinct response systems: reactive responses (which engage defensive reflexes); tension responses (where uncertainty leads to stress); predictive responses (which reward accurate prediction); imaginative responses (which facilitate deferred gratification); and appraisal responses (which occur after conscious thought is engaged). For real-world events, these five response systems typically produce a complex mixture of feelings. The book identifies some of the aesthetic possibilities afforded by expectation, and shows how common musical devices (such as syncopation, cadence, meter, tonality, and climax) exploit the psychological opportunities. The theory also provides new insights into the physiological psychology of awe, laughter, and "spine-tingling chills." Huron traces the psychology of expectations from the patterns of the physical/cultural world through imperfectly learned heuristics used to predict that world to the phenomenal qualia experienced by those who apprehend the world.