This paper describes a method for obtaining a list of chorus (refrain) sections in compact-disc recordings of popular music. The detection of chorus sections is essential for the computational modeling of music understanding and is useful in various applications, such as automatic chorus-preview functions in music browsers or retrieval systems. Most previous methods detected as a chorus a repeated section of a given length and had difficulty in identifying both ends of a chorus section and in dealing with modulations (key changes). By analyzing relationships between various repeated sections, our method called RefraiD can detect all the chorus sections in a song and estimate both ends of each section. It can also detect modulated chorus sections by introducing a similarity that enables modulated repetition to be judged correctly. Experimental results with a popular-music database show that this method detects the correct chorus sections in 80 of 100 songs.

Music Information Retrieval (MIR) is an interdisciplinary research area that has grown out of the need to manage burgeoning collections of music in digital form. Its diverse disciplinary communities, exemplified by the recently established ISMIR conference series, have yet to articulate a common research agenda or agree on methodological principles and metrics of success. In order for MIR to succeed, researchers need to work with real user communities and develop research resources such as reference music collections, so that the wide variety of techniques being developed in MIR can be meaningfully compared with one another. Out of these efforts, a common MIR practice can emerge.

This paper describes a novel audio only interface for selecting music which enables us to select songs without having to click a mouse. Using previous music players with normal headphones, we can hear only one song at a time and we thus have to play pieces individually to select the one we want to hear from numerous new music files, which involves a large number of mouse operations. The main advantage of our headphones is that they detect natural movements, such as the head or hand moving when users are listening to music and they can focus on a particular musical source that they want to hear. By moving their head left or right, listeners can hear the source from a frontal position as the digital compass detects the change in the direction they are facing. By looking up or down, the tilt sensor will detect the change in the face’s angle of elevation; they can better hear the source that is allocated to a more distant or closer position. By putting their hand behind their ear, listeners can adjust the focus sensor on the headphones to focus on a particular musical source that they want to hear.

This paper describes a new music-playback interface for trial listening, SmartMusicKIOSK. In music stores, short trial listening of CD music is not usually a passive experience --- customers often search out the chorus or "hook" of a song using the fast-forward button. Listening of this type, however, has not been traditionally supported. This research achieves a function for jumping to the chorus section and other key parts of a song plus a function for visualizing song structure. These functions make it easier for a listener to find desired parts of a song and thereby facilitate an active listening experience. The proposed functions are achieved by an automatic chorus-section detecting method, and the results of implementing them as a listening station have demonstrated their usefulness.

Abstract—This paper describes a method for obtaining a list of repeated chorus (“hook”) sections in compact-disc recordings of popular music. The detection of chorus sections is essential for the computational modeling of music understanding and is useful in various applications, such as automatic chorus-preview/search functions in music listening stations, music browsers, or music retrieval systems. Most previous methods detected as a chorus a repeated section of a given length and had difficulty identifying both ends of a chorus section and dealing with modulations (key changes). By analyzing relationships between various repeated sections, our method, called RefraiD, can detect all the chorus sections in a song and estimate both ends of each section. It can also detect modulated chorus sections by introducing a perceptually motivated acoustic feature and a similarity that enable detection of a repeated chorus section even after modulation. Experimental results with a popular music database showed that this method correctly detected the chorus sections in 80 of 100 songs. This paper also describes an application of our method, a new music-playback interface for trial listening called Smart-MusicKIOSK, which enables a listener to directly jump to and listen to the chorus section while viewing a graphical overview of the entire song structure. The results of implementing this application have demonstrated its usefulness. Index Terms—Chorus detection, chroma vector, music-playback interface, music structure, music understanding. I.