The yearly gathering of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) is upon us and Chordify is attending this twentieth anniversary of the conference. But what is ISMIR actually?
For us, this annual conference is more than just a gathering of people. We have emotional ties to it, because we launched our first beta version during the 2012 edition of ISMIR in Porto. In a way, it’s Chordify’s cradle. This year we’re a sponsor of the conference.
ISMIR 2019 Delft
ISMIR is a nonprofit organization that focuses on advancing the accessibility, organization, and processing of musical information. They bring together scientists form disparate fields to collaborate and find diverse ways of developing the study of musical information.
Think of computer systems that help people understand musical data better. To do so you need insights from different areas of expertise, like computer science, psychology, neuroscience, library and information science, engineering, and artificial intelligence. It’s a melting pot of diverse areas where interesting ideas originate.
Chordify at ISMIR 2019
We also contribute on a scientific level to this beautiful event. This year we present our research concerning semi-automatic enhancement of beat tracking. This is the perfect challenge for us, because we’re always looking for ways to improve of our algorithm.
A short explanation: to allow our users to change chords at the right moment we need an exact timestamp of the beat in an audio recording; and we do that by … exactly: tapping to the beat. The problem is that even trained musicians sometimes have a hard time precisely following the beat. At ISMIR we present a simple algorithm that can automatically correct ninety-nine percent of the wrongly placed taps.
But wait, there’s more. We also have a new visualization that enables us to detect the wrongly placed taps instantly. That allows the researcher to easily recognize the rest of the misplaced taps and correct them by hand. A bit too technical? Doesn’t matter. What matters is that it will be even easier to keep the beat when you’re playing along. And if you want to know more, join us in Delft! Whatever you do, happy jamming!
