The role of loudness in detection of surprising events in music recordings

2009

The abrupt change of loudness is a salient event that is not always expected by a music listener. Therefore loudness is an important cue when seeking for events in a music stream that could violate human expectations. The concept of expectation and surprise in music has become recently the subject of extensive research, however mostly using symbolic data. The aim of this work is to investigate the circumstances when a change of sound intensity could be surprising for a listener. Then, using this knowledge, we aim to build a computational model that analyzes an audio stream and points to potential violations of human expectation. In order to check the quality of human prediction, an online (…