Moodbar v1.1 (24.03.2008) [MM3] moodbar_tool v1.1

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Post by Guest »

RedX wrote: Now when the panel is disabled no calculations are done.
Great, thanks!!

Claude
Guest

Post by Guest »

Sorry, doesn't seem to work here. Moodbar disabled/hidden by unchecking it in the view dialogue, but although the panel is hidden the process clearly keeps working as always.

Using latest MM3 beta.
Claude
Guest

Post by Guest »

OK, Claude again, since I can't turn off moodbar I might as well just discuss it... I know this is more of a script development thread, but I thougt it might be still worth posting it here.

I've been experimenting with / trying out moodbar to see whether it is just nice to look at - which it is 8) - or whether there is really a substantial use/meaning to it.

Of course, often there is "something happening" - or, sometimes, maybe not after all :-? Also, I don't doubt the mathematical foundation. But there's a difference between foundational math and intuitive music pattern recognition. I did read the scientific paper of moodbar's parents - too bad its pictures are in grayscale, no colour, which makes the examples less intuitive.

After looking at dozens of songs and moodbars from different genres (classical, rock, jazz, vocal, electronic) my personal impression is positive but also somewhat mixed, and it sure is interesting and I'll keep experimenting. My impression is:

- there are many examples where moodbar won't give me much information (music without very distinct passages/parts); usually just very colorfully striped from start to end

- there are many examples where moodbar seems to mislead and contrast my listening experience: sudden bold thick <put color here> passages, where I really can't distinguish accoustically

- generally, the thin striping doesn't seem to reflect my experience, maybe it's too technical, to tiny, etc. information I don't notice it qualitatively by just listening. Of course there's lots of beats/drums/bass etc. changing all the time, but I can't connect that intuitively/visually to the thin striping. The broader, more general change in major coloring seems to be what's interesting to me (e.g. from more-greenish to more-reddish)

In the science paper it says there are two interesting measurement dimensions: the grayscale/shading and the color. I don't know what's chosen exactly in the final implementation, but it seems that dark shades represent dominant bass, green-yellow represents high tones. See also the link below regarding this issue.

Now some examples.

- Traditional singer/song structures might exhibit a structure where you can identify the end of choruses or verses by thick black/dark passages, because the's some sort of silence before the new verse/chorus starts.

- Many average, billboard rock/pop music pieces are not very interesting, because they are similar from start to end, especially their base lines and drum lines - as well as the singing :roll: Actually this also applies to a lot of classical music - of course only to certain styles, but still a lot. It's not as undifferentiatedly continuously rainbow striped as no frills billboard pop, it often is more differently structured, but still not that helpful. This applies to e.g. baroque choir music, single-instrument or small-group chamber music, as well as certain full orchestra pieces whithout strong differentiation in frequency etc. I guess the kind of qualitative artistic musical changes the human ear/brain clearly likes in these examples just escape the specific measures chosen, and escape the measurement capabilities of current technology/methodology.

- electronic music gives good to excellent results for two reasons: first, synthetic music sources (the more natural world samples, the worse) lack the accoustic complexity of human-played instruments, i.e.: they sound similar over a period of time. Second, and more importantly, a lot of electronic music - the more "danceable" the "better" - is repetitive over some period of time until a (alow or) major change in drum/base/sample line shows up, again for some time. Therefore these periods are coloured quite differently.

I might post some moodbar examples with comments some other day if you're interested.

I was desperately searching the net for some comments on the moodbar, almost without success - to my surprise. But here's a link to a blog entry commenting on the results of moodbar:

http://blog.randomprocesses.net/2007/02/moodbar.html

Have a look, it's short and interesting.
Dreadlau
Posts: 1967
Joined: Sun Nov 25, 2007 6:49 am

Post by Dreadlau »

intresting. I'd like to learn more and see some examples.
Seven Ultimate X64 SP1 / Sansa Clip 2go (with RockBox)
indescribable
Posts: 55
Joined: Fri May 04, 2007 10:44 pm

Post by indescribable »

would it be possible to make it so that moodbar starts in the last status?

for now... whether i close it or not... the next time i open mm it starts as open
† ιη∂εš¢яιвαвℓє™
hintergrundrauschen
Posts: 211
Joined: Sat Mar 29, 2008 6:20 pm

Interpretation, continued

Post by hintergrundrauschen »

Here are the promised, analyzed examples of moodbars. Comments welcome.

Image

1) Annett Louisan: "Ich ...be Dich" (Pop, Vocal; soft calm intimate love song)
V verse
S silence
C chorus

You can clearly see the silence between verses, everything else is less obvious. But you can see that the chorus is somewhat less "intimate" than the verses, the sound is more blue; of course, trhis is even more so the case during the instrumental part.

2) Trentemoller: "Killer Kat" (Electronic, repetitive)
x0 very simple, clear bassline only
x1 bass/low pitch, warm, more complex than before
x2 high notes set in stronger and stronger
x3 high "noise"-samples

As written before, repetitive electronic music offers some of the bars with the most distinguishable parts: whithin parts of the bar the music is quite repetitive, but the different parts of the bar are quite different, since bassline, melody, samples etc. change strongly. I can't really describe why the green part is greenish, it just sounds different :wink:


3) Katie Melua: Nine Million Bicycles (Pop, vocal, soft calm intimate love song)
x1 high pitch flutes
x2/C singing starts (Chorus - this song mainly consists of variated choruses)
x3 still flute, but darker, softer


4) Herb Alpert: This guy's in love with you (Easy Listening, Vocal)
The great Herb Alpert with a not very typical, but great and successful song (he's not playing trumpet here as usually, but sings). You can't see that much, but twice you can see the building up of tension in the song (including upwards climbing chords, colors becoming yellowish), followed by a green-white release of the tension (high pitch clear bright music) and then followed by a sudden slowing down, dark, soft, backpedalling)

5) Amy Winehouse: "Rehab" (Pop-Jazz-Vocal)
As written before, much popular music songs with lots of background instruments seem to be difficult to picture qualitatively. Can't say much about it, but the first greenish section corresponds to her "no no no" section, followed by the "go go go" section" :wink:

6) Lou Reed: "Perfect Day" (Rock-Vocal)
V verse
C chorus (bright, high pitch)
x1 piano, piano/violins section

7) J.S. Bach: Two-part Invention No. 1 in C, BWV 772 (Classical, Violin & Cello duet)
Now, the difficult classical music examples. I guess the interaction of violin and cello, playing the very complex chords and phrasing of Bachs Inventions makes it very difficult to say something about it

8 ) Verdi: Requiem, II.: Dies Irae (cond.: von Karajan) (Classical, large orchestra & large choir)
The musical complexity of this amazing requiem just can't be described by moodbar. The first part is bombastic - the forte fortissimo of the large orchestra and the large choir makes frequency analysis for moodbar impossible right now; the great mystical-low-voice-almost-silence of the second part is too muted to be noticed better in the picture.

9) Wagner: Walkürenritt (ride of Valkyrie) (cond.: von Karajan) (Classical, orchestral work)
Soprano sets in at x1 until the end of the arrow, sets in again at the next x1 - whatever that means here in moodbar... All in all: too complex and agitated to get an interesting picture. You might interpret and find a lot of things... but intuitively, moodbar isn't much help here.

10) Telemann: Concerto for trumpet, strings & continuo in D major, TWV 51:D7: I. Adagio (trumpet.: Otto Sauer) (Classical, trumpet solo concerto)

Now this recording (one of the musically best there is) is very interesting in terms of its picture. Read x3's description first.

x1 looks like x3, but isn't, it's fooling you. Maybe dark because its some sort of gentle/mute end of phrase. But technically, the phrase ends in between the two dark x1 bars, Sauer actually breathes right in between them.
x2 high pitch melody lines
x3 end of trumpet phrases (phrase parts)
x4 continuous trumpet playing, but there's a sudden volume decline when Sauer repeats the same phrase again as some sort of answer/reply.

I wish you could listen to the music while reading/looking at this, but obviously I can't provide the music :roll: Maybe you got some of it, like Amy Winehouse, Lou Reed or Bach's intervention.
Claude
Dreadlau
Posts: 1967
Joined: Sun Nov 25, 2007 6:49 am

Post by Dreadlau »

My first comment would be that you have great musical tastes :D
Seven Ultimate X64 SP1 / Sansa Clip 2go (with RockBox)
Dreadlau
Posts: 1967
Joined: Sun Nov 25, 2007 6:49 am

Post by Dreadlau »

btw, redX. How does your script works?
Does it use the amarok moodbar engine? In this case can it be tweaked in some ways?
Seven Ultimate X64 SP1 / Sansa Clip 2go (with RockBox)
RedX
Posts: 366
Joined: Wed Dec 27, 2006 10:32 am
Location: Germany

Post by RedX »

Hi!

First i'd like to clarify that moodbar is in no way supposed to be an analytical tool for seeing the REAL mood or speed of a music piece and (as noticed) moodbar cannot really be compared between songs.
Moodbar is supposed to be just a fun replacement for the progressbar and a neat way of selecting a song.
For one to really capture the mood and make the moodbar comparable between songs it would have to make an analysis of the results of the DFT (aka FFT) and separate vocals and different instruments which is not done.
The way moodbar works atm is it just takes the FFT spectrum and displays high pitches in blue and deep tones in red (the coloring here corresponds to the chosen mood coloring scheme and this schemes correspond to the "no mood" scheme which you cannot choose in my implementation ;-) )

My implementation is a rewrite of the code for linux, which i will post on sourceforge as soon as i have time for it. So yes the code can be tweaked as needed.
With enough knowledge about instrument recognition you could really make a moodbar that separates the instruments and then colorizes on that data. But i haven't found many papers on that subject in the internet so i have to wait till i get those (or similar subjects) at the university.

But i find it to be very cool how this also got the interest of other people as much as it has got me fascinated :-)

I will fix the issues reported shortly.

Thanks for all the feedback.
Red
hintergrundrauschen
Posts: 211
Joined: Sat Mar 29, 2008 6:20 pm

Post by hintergrundrauschen »

@Dreadlau: thanks :D I like my music to be very diverse...

@RedX: I know moodbar is supposed to be a neat and entertaining progressbar, and it sure is. So it is a great script even if there would be no additional meaning to it! But since the foundation of it is somewhat scientific - in a mathematical sense, not a complete psycho-acoustic way - I thought it would be interesting to see whether (by just looking at it) there is more to it than just nice colors, and I think the examples show well under which circumstances you indeed can interpret something visually and where you can't.

BTW, after uninstalling and reinstalling moodbar, the disabling of it (i.e. the moodbar.exe process, not just the visuals) does work for me, too.
Claude
Guest

Post by Guest »

would it be possible to make it so that moodbar starts in the last status?

for now... whether i close it or not... the next time i open mm it starts as open
I'd very much appreciate that, too. MM now needs even more time to start up, because Moodbar immediately starts analyzing the currently selected song in the playlist.
faramirza
Posts: 10
Joined: Mon Apr 14, 2008 12:38 pm

Post by faramirza »

Please help. How do I get rid of this error?

"Entry point not found in QTcore4.dll" as soon as the Page loads and when I close MM
faramirza
Posts: 10
Joined: Mon Apr 14, 2008 12:38 pm

Post by faramirza »

faramirza wrote:Please help. How do I get rid of this error?

"Entry point not found in QTcore4.dll" as soon as the Page loads and when I close MM
Solved my own problem.

For some reason the Plugin did not copy the QT Libraries across during install. I thought they're missing so I downloaded a version off the net. It was an older version than the one inside the plugin's installer. I extracted the .dll's from the installer and manually copied it into the correct location.
RedX
Posts: 366
Joined: Wed Dec 27, 2006 10:32 am
Location: Germany

Post by RedX »

faramirza wrote:
faramirza wrote:Please help. How do I get rid of this error?

"Entry point not found in QTcore4.dll" as soon as the Page loads and when I close MM
Solved my own problem.

For some reason the Plugin did not copy the QT Libraries across during install. I thought they're missing so I downloaded a version off the net. It was an older version than the one inside the plugin's installer. I extracted the .dll's from the installer and manually copied it into the correct location.
This should be the correct way. Check whether the plugin installed it. If not get the correct version from the internet, or post here (it should be somewhere on page 1 or 2.

I've just gotten of the stressfull part of the semester. Somewhere within this week an update should correct the disabled startup bug ;-)

Regards & bestf wishes,
Red

PS: YEAH! party time again :-D
Rojer
Posts: 65
Joined: Tue Aug 22, 2006 5:06 am

Error line 512. MM3 crashed. Vista.

Post by Rojer »

Hey there, thanks for this script, looks exciting :)

Unfortunately, I can't get it to work on MM3+Vista. Monkeyrok is installed and works fine, set for a dedicated temp folder which the installer pick for me.

At MM3 startup, I get an error message which window is half hidden from repetitive additional messages. What i can read states :

Error #424 -Err........HIDDEN
Required Object 'SD....HIDDEN
File: "G:\prog......HIDDEN (assuming vbs file)...... Line 512 column 15

The second error window blinks like it's on a loop and states "Error executing script event". I have to kill mediamonkey to close it.

What I found beside this :
  • The DLL files were not installed, I downloaded them separately.
    After having installed the two dll files, a new error was issued (using moodbar.exe from console) : QtGui4.dll was not meant to be run on windows or has errors. (Translation from french). sp2 ompatibility mode did not help.
    Using the uninstaller from MM3 does not work either ; but it might be because I have to remove the script from the auto folder to have MM3 able to run.
I am investigating path problems but I can't see anything obvious so far.

Any thoughts?

Thanks for reading.
Rojer.


OS is Vista SP1.
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