About

Marsyas (Music Analysis, Retrieval and Synthesis for Audio Signals) is an open source software framework for audio processing with specific emphasis on Music Information Retrieval applications. It has been designed and written by George Tzanetakis (gtzan@cs.uvic.ca) with help from students and researchers from around the world. Marsyas has been used for a variety of projects in both academia and industry.

Featured Project

Modeling Emotional Content of Music

In this project, the emotional content of music was modeled as a function of music features. The model's inputs were time varying features; many features were extracted using Marsyas. The model's output was a 2-dimensional time varying signal that quanitified emotion. The emotion signal was generated by volunteers who evaluated the emotional content of several musical selections and models were created using system identification techniques. M. D Korhonen Systems Design Engineering, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 2004

Featured Developer

Main Designer and Developer George Tzanetakis

Affiliation : University of Victoria

I am an assistant professor in Computer Science (also cross-listed in Music and Electrical and Computer Engineering) at the University of Victoria in Canada. I received my PhD in Computer Science from Princeton University under the supervision of Dr. Perry Cook. I also worked at Carnegie Mellon University as a PostDoctoral Fellow with Dr. Roger Dannenberg on query-by-humming systems and audio-score alignment and with the Informedia group on multimodal video retrieval and microphone arrays.

I have also consulted with several companies using Marsyas. They include&58 Moodlogic Inc. (audio fingerpriting), All Music Inc, The Netherlands (music-speech classification), and Teligence Communications Inc. (gender classification of voice recordings).

My research deals with all stages of audio content analysis such as feature extraction, segmentation, classification, retrieval and source separation with specific focus on Music Information Retrieval (MIR). I am also an active musician and have studied saxophone performance, music theory and composition.

Featured Web Demo

Neil's Skookum MarSystem Network Constructor Neil's Skookum MarSystem Network Constructor

A Java web applet built with Processing that allows users to construct Marsyas networks inside a web browser.

Featured Video

KeyBoard Controlled Assistive Music Browser

The goal of this project is to develop Assistive Music Browser Software that will enable users with severe disabilities to navigate through their own collections of music via a variety of input methods. We extract relevant features and analyze the audio data within a collection of music (of essentially unlimited size) and map the songs onto a 2-D space, called a self-organizing map, based on similarity. Continual audio feedback is provided to the user as they search their collection to aide in navigation and selection. http://www.canassist.ca