ï~~A MUSIC LOOP EXPLORER SYSTEM
Sebastian Streich Bee Suan Ong
YAMAHA Corporation
Center for Advanced Sound Technologies
203 Matsunokijima, Iwata
Shizuoka 438-0192, JAPAN
{ sstreich,beesuan } @beat.yamaha.co.jp
ABSTRACT
Music loops, seamlessly repeating segments of audio,
are an important ingredient for remixes and mash-ups.
By recombining loops taken from complete tracks or
from loop libraries not only professional DJs but even
musical laypersons can enjoy the experience of music
creation. One key aspect is to identify what sounds good
together. To facilitate this selection process, we present
a system for exploring collections of music loops
through a graphical user interface that allows playful
interaction with the content. The system first extracts
loop segments from a selection of music tracks. The
loops are then visualized as graphical objects in a GUI.
Depending on their needs, the users can switch between
various criteria for the visualization of the objects which
is based on a set of manually or algorithmically
provided features. Interaction with the objects triggers
playback and simple effects on the loops.
1. INTRODUCTION
Loop centred music software is around now for several
years already; the pioneering "ReCycle" was released
by Propellerhead Software as early as 1994. With many
followers from other music software companies, this
type of application enjoys high popularity until today.
Improvements and extensions of functionality were
introduced over the years, for example to have a more
reliable beat slicing or to allow smooth switching
between loops in live performance situations. With our
proposed system we want to demonstrate possible
improvements in two areas that have seen only modest
advancement since the early days. The first one consists
in the automatic extraction of loops from entire music
tracks. This functionality enables users to utilize
material from their entire music collection for remixing
without the need for laborious manual cutting. As we
have reported the underlying technology in previous
publications (see [6]), we will cover this part only very
briefly in this publication.
The second improvement, which is the main topic of
this paper, concerns the loop selection or file browsing
section of the above mentioned family of programs.
While modern programs of said type often include some
library management functionalities, they fail in
providing a compact overview of the entire loop
collection. Also, even when pre-views are featured, it is
not very straightforward to quickly try many different
combinations of loops and thus identify interesting
candidates for building up a new track. Here, we
combine concepts for collection visualization known
from the domain of music information retrieval (e.g., [1]
or [4]) with targeted functionalities in order to allow
playful exploration of a loop collection.
Figure 1. Overview diagram of the main components
in our loop explorer system.
2. SYSTEM DESCRIPTION
The loop explorer system presented here has four main
units. These are the loop segment extraction, the feature
extraction, the visualization in the GUI, and the
playback management. Figure 1 shows an overview
diagram. As can be seen, the loop segment extraction
block is an optional component as long as a loop
collection is already available. However, this
functionality opens up very interesting perspectives by
giving access to a multitude of loop segments taken
from a user's entire music collection or just from his or
her favourite tracks.
At current state the system is not yet integrated into
one single application. The loop segment extraction is
so far realized in form of a MATLAB script, the feature
extraction is done with a separate executable, and the
GUI and playback component are programmed in the
TCL/TK scripting language. Ultimately, the idea is of
course that the system either forms an independent
stand-alone application or, even better, is integrated as
part of the library management inside a loop sequencer
software.
