Covers 1000: The Demo

Below is an interactive demo that allows users to play two cover songs synchronized with a cross-similarity matrix, which is a matrix describing how similar every beat from one song is with every beat from another song. Long diagonals in these images indicate that many beats match in sequence, which is a good indication that the songs are indeed covers of each other (see the paper for more details).

In the demo below, choose a song example from the precomputed songs list. Then press play/pause to play/pause the audio, left click on the image to jump to a beat from the first song, and right click (or CTRL + Click) to jump to a beat from the second song. If you switch between the two songs along a bright diagonal, you should switch between two matched regions. This will allow you to hear how two different artists express the same musical idea.

You can look at the results with different feature types by selecting an option from the "Feature Type" menu (note that "SNF" is the fusion of all features, as described in the paper). You will notice that certain features are better than others at picking up on similarity in different contexts. For instance, in the "Tricky" example, traditional pitch-based HPCP features do extremely poorly because it's a hip hop song with one repeated note in the background, so notes give very little information. The drum solo "Zappa" is similar in this regard. By contrast, the notes are carried quite well in the "Smooth Criminal" example.

If you would like to try your own examples, please visit this link for instructions on how to do so.

Precomputed Examples Bad Company My Generation Party Rock Despacito Toto-Africa Smooth Criminal Sweet Dreams Take On Me Time Tricky Zappa Try Me No Hands VocalToJazz La Folia		File Input:
Feature Type	Image Type CSM Binary CSM Smith-Waterman Matrix
Play Pause		Score:
Waiting for user input...