Hi everyone, it's been a while since we posted news regarding the MSD, so here are thoughts on two recent items: Serra et. al's work in Scientific Reports, and the end of the Million Song Dataset Challenge.
For those who have somehow missed it, "Measuring the Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music" by J. Serra, A. Corral, M. Boguna, M. Haro and J.L. Arcos got a lot of press coverage, ranging from Nature.com to Reuters and my favorite one, The American Conservative. Many thanks to the authors for putting the MSD on the front page of Nature.com!
What is particularly exciting is the scope of this work. No mention of 0.5% improvement on genre recognition or how to measure similarity between 500 songs, authors study the evolution of all pop music during the last 50 years! We always hoped that creating the MSD would generate such ambitious work, and here it is.
Ok, the scientific in me has tons of concerns about assumptions that should be further validated: underestimation of the bias in the Echo Nest collection and in the selection of songs for the MSD, release date versus re-release date, quantization with a fixed-threshold that can be affected by production issues such as compression, sufficient complexity of a model based on very local transitions, errors in the MSD, etc.
But I can't wait to discuss those questions at the next ISMIR, and I hope it will spawn many follow-up papers in the same vein.
Second item, the approaching end of the Million Song Dataset Challenge, only 7 days left! It has been a huge success with 176 players in 137 teams submitting over 800 submissions. Even removing trivial or test submissions, more than 25 teams have submitted serious solutions, more than what we could have achieved through a usual MIREX contest for instance. We also have had a new leader for the past week, Maksims Volkovs from the University of Toronto. One benefit of such a contest is to have participants coming from outside the field of Music Information Retrieval; Maksims has been studying general ranking algorithms. Good luck to all participants for the last few days!
Otherwise, looking forward to seeing everyone at this year's ISMIR. Any restaurant recommendation for Porto or Lisbon?
Cheers!
--TBM
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