Scalable Music Recommendation by Search

• US 20090277322A1
• Filed: 05/07/2008
• Published: 11/12/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 05/07/2008
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Ma, Wei-Ying, Zhang, Lei, Cai, Rui
• Granted Patent: US 8,344,233 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 84/609
• CPC Class Codes: G10H 1/0058 Transmission between separate instruments or between individual components of a musical system G10H1/0083 takes precedence
• CPC Class Codes: G10H 2210/081 for automatic key or tonality recognition, e.g. using musical rules or a knowledge base
• CPC Class Codes: G10H 2240/135 Library retrieval index, i.e. using an indexing scheme to efficiently retrieve a music piece
• CPC Class Codes: G10H 2240/305 Internet or TCP/IP protocol use for any electrophonic musical instrument data or musical parameter transmission purposes
• CPC Class Codes: G10H 2250/011 Genetic algorithms, i.e. using computational steps analogous to biological selection, recombination and mutation on an initial population of, e.g. sounds, pieces, melodies or loops to compose or otherwise generate, e.g. evolutionary music or sound synthesis

Abstract

An exemplary method includes providing a music collection of a particular scale, determining a distance parameter for locality sensitive hashing based at least in part on the scale of the music collection and constructing an index for the music collection. Another exemplary method includes providing a song, extracting snippets from the song, analyzing time-varying timbre characteristics of the snippets and constructing one or more queries based on the analyzing. Such exemplary methods may be implemented by a portable device configured to maintain an index, to perform searches based on selected songs or portions of songs and to generate playlists from search results. Other exemplary methods, devices, systems, etc., are also disclosed.

Claims

1. A method, implemented at least in part by a computing device, comprising:

providing a music collection of a particular scale;

determining a distance parameter for locality sensitive hashing based at least in part on the scale of the music collection; and

constructing an index for the music collection.

2. The method of claim 1 wherein the distance parameter comprises a nearest neighbors'"'"' distance.

3. The method of claim 1 wherein the determining comprises determining the distance parameter based at least in part on a probability density function of a Gamma distribution.

4. The method of claim 1 wherein the determining comprises determining the distance parameter iteratively.

5. The method of claim 1 wherein the distance parameter comprises a scales sensitive parameter.

6. An index for a music collection constructed by the method of claim 1.

7. One or more computer-readable media comprising computer-executable instructions to perform the method of claim 1.

8. A method, implemented at least in part by a computing device, the method comprising:

providing a song;

extracting snippets from the song;

analyzing time-varying timbre characteristics of the snippets; and

constructing one or more queries based on the analyzing.

9. The method of claim 8 wherein each snippet comprises a duration of at least approximately 5 seconds.

10. The method of claim 8 wherein each snippet comprises signatures.

11. The method of claim 10 wherein adjacent signatures overlap.

12. The method of claim 10 further comprising clustering signatures for each snippet.

13. The method of claim 12 wherein the constructing one or more queries comprises selecting a signature from a cluster as a query term.

14. The method of claim 13 wherein the selecting selects the signature closest to the center of a cluster as a query term.

15. The method of claim 8 further comprising performing a search using the one or more queries.

16. The method of claim 15 further comprising generating a song playlist based on results responsive to the search.

17. One or more computer-readable media comprising computer-executable instructions to perform the method of claim 8.

18. A portable device comprising:

one or more processors;

memory; and

control logic to select a song, to form a query based on acoustic characteristics of one or more segments of the song, to search an index of a music collection and to recommend songs in the music collection.

19. The portable device of claim 18 wherein the index comprises an index constructed using locality sensitive hashing and a parameter sensitive to scale of a music collection.

20. The portable device of claim 18 further comprising control logic to repeat a search to cause the recommended songs to drift from the selected song.