Content-adaptive musical audio watermarking based on the music theory of chords

This paper proposes a novel content-adaptive music watermarking technique which uses the principles of music theory to enhance the capacity and robustness of watermark embedding. Using the musical concepts of key and chords, certain notes, which are musically coherent with the work, can be added or removed without impacting the listeners experience. The notes serve as the carrier of the watermarked bit. Since these notes are still within the human hearing range, with high enough strength, they will still remain intact after various audio compressions or distortions. The scheme does not require the original work to extract the watermark and serves as a framework to involve musical theory in optimizing watermark embedding algorithms.