--Recent advancements have brought generated music closer to human-created compositions, yet evaluating these models remains challenging. While human preference is the gold standard for assessing quality, translating these subjective judgments into objective metrics, particularly for text-audio alignment and music quality, has proven difficult. In this work, we generate 6k songs using 12 state-of-the-art models and conduct a survey of 15k pairwise audio comparisons with 2.5k human participants to evaluate the correlation between human preferences and widely used metrics. T o the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to rank current state-of-the-art music generation models and metrics based on human preference. T o further the field of subjective metric evaluation, we provide open access to our dataset of generated music and human evaluations.

Most music widely consumed in Western Countries contains song lyrics, with U.S. samples reporting almost all of their song libraries contain lyrics. In parallel, social science theory suggests that personal values - the abstract goals that guide our decisions and behaviors - play an important role in communication: we share what is important to us to coordinate efforts, solve problems and meet challenges. Thus, the values communicated in song lyrics may be similar or different to those of the listener, and by extension affect the listener's reaction to the song. This suggests that working towards automated estimation of values in lyrics may assist in downstream MIR tasks, in particular, personalization. However, as highly subjective text, song lyrics present a challenge in terms of sampling songs to be annotated, annotation methods, and in choosing a method for aggregation. In this project, we take a perspectivist approach, guided by social science theory, to gathering annotations, estimating their quality, and aggregating them. We then compare aggregated ratings to estimates based on pre-trained sentence/word embedding models by employing a validated value dictionary. We discuss conceptually 'fuzzy' solutions to sampling and annotation challenges, promising initial results in annotation quality and in automated estimations, and future directions.

Music plays a huge part in shaping peoples' psychology and behavioral patterns. This paper investigates the connection between national anthems and different global indices with computational music analysis and statistical correlation analysis. We analyze national anthem musical data to determine whether certain musical characteristics are associated with peace, happiness, suicide rate, crime rate, etc. To achieve this, we collect national anthems from 169 countries and use computational music analysis techniques to extract pitch, tempo, beat, and other pertinent audio features. We then compare these musical characteristics with data on different global indices to ascertain whether a significant correlation exists. Our findings indicate that there may be a correlation between the musical characteristics of national anthems and the indices we investigated. The implications of our findings for music psychology and policymakers interested in promoting social well-being are discussed. This paper emphasizes the potential of musical data analysis in social research and offers a novel perspective on the relationship between music and social indices. The source code and data are made open-access for reproducibility and future research endeavors. It can be accessed at http://bit.ly/na_code.

This study explores the association between music preferences and moral values by applying text analysis techniques to lyrics. Harvesting data from a Facebook-hosted application, we align psychometric scores of 1,386 users to lyrics from the top 5 songs of their preferred music artists as emerged from Facebook Page Likes. We extract a set of lyrical features related to each song's overarching narrative, moral valence, sentiment, and emotion. A machine learning framework was designed to exploit regression approaches and evaluate the predictive power of lyrical features for inferring moral values. Results suggest that lyrics from top songs of artists people like inform their morality. Virtues of hierarchy and tradition achieve higher prediction scores ($.20 \leq r \leq .30$) than values of empathy and equality ($.08 \leq r \leq .11$), while basic demographic variables only account for a small part in the models' explainability. This shows the importance of music listening behaviours, as assessed via lyrical preferences, alone in capturing moral values. We discuss the technological and musicological implications and possible future improvements.

Music preferences are strongly shaped by the cultural and socio-economic background of the listener, which is reflected, to a considerable extent, in country-specific music listening profiles. Previous work has already identified several country-specific differences in the popularity distribution of music artists listened to. In particular, what constitutes the "music mainstream" strongly varies between countries. To complement and extend these results, the article at hand delivers the following major contributions: First, using state-of-the-art unsupervised learning techniques, we identify and thoroughly investigate (1) country profiles of music preferences on the fine-grained level of music tracks (in contrast to earlier work that relied on music preferences on the artist level) and (2) country archetypes that subsume countries sharing similar patterns of listening preferences. Second, we formulate four user models that leverage the user's country information on music preferences. Among others, we propose a user modeling approach to describe a music listener as a vector of similarities over the identified country clusters or archetypes. Third, we propose a context-aware music recommendation system that leverages implicit user feedback, where context is defined via the four user models. More precisely, it is a multi-layer generative model based on a variational autoencoder, in which contextual features can influence recommendations through a gating mechanism. Fourth, we thoroughly evaluate the proposed recommendation system and user models on a real-world corpus of more than one billion listening records of users around the world (out of which we use 369 million in our experiments) and show its merits vis-a-vis state-of-the-art algorithms that do not exploit this type of context information.

Computer vision and image recognition are integral parts of artificial intelligence (AI), which has quickly gone from niche to mainstream in the past few years. And nowhere was this more evident than at CES 2017 earlier this month. From a few days of wandering the floor, here are some of the coolest new uses of computer vision. The biggest displays of computer vision are coming from the automotive industry, because computer vision, after all, is one of the central enabling technologies of semi- and fully-autonomous cars. NVIDIA, which already helped supercharge the deep learning revolution with its deep learning GPU tools, is powering many of the autonomous car innovations with the NVIDIA Drive PX 2, a self-driving car reference platform that Tesla, Volvo, Audi, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz are already using for semi- and fully-autonomous functions.