Frontiers of music technologies

Music technologies will open the future up to new ways of enjoying music both in terms of music appreciation and music creation. In this keynote speech, I introduce the frontiers of music technologies by showing some practical examples to demonstrate how end users can benefit from music signal processing, music understanding technologies, singing synthesis technologies, and music interfaces. For example, a web service for active music listening, “Songle” (http://songle.jp), has analyzed more than 830,000 songs on music- or video-sharing services and facilitates deeper understanding of music and music-synchronized control of robot dancers. A web service for large-scale music browsing, “Songrium” (http://songrium.jp), allows users to explore music while seeing and utilizing various relations among more than 680,000 music video clips on video-sharing services. Singing synthesis technologies open up new possibilities in music creation. I conclude by discussing grand challenges.