stevetjoa

In the spirit of releasing things before they're ready...

I've been working on Violin.io (https://violin.io) since 2015. It's eventually intended to be interactive sheet music in the browser synced with YouTube recordings of classical music through the use of music information retrieval (MIR) algorithms. For example, click on the score at measure 50, and you'll get a YouTube video at measure 50, and you can change among different performances of that work at measure 50.

To view my rejected application for the inaugural Classical Goes Tech pitch competition last November, see https://stevetjoa.com/classicalgoestech/.

There remains technical challenges, so for now you won't find much yet other than well-tagged and categorized videos of classical works without sheet music. But I'm actively working on it.

You can help. If you frequently listen to or perform classical music, contact me at steve at violin io. I would like to know what specific works interest you. Currently, I'd prefer to focus on strings or piano, and Bach/Mozart/Beethoven/Brahms, and preferably chamber. But I'm open to all suggestions. (I think there's merit to pleasing a narrow audience very well, and with classical music variety being enormous, it can get out of hand quickly.)

I welcome it. I enjoy the challenge of staying focused when I notice out of the corner of my eye a crowd forming or people filming.

Sometimes I cope by playing with my eyes closed. Violinists have options where to position their eyes: on their bow, on their fingers (rare, but helpful sometimes in practice), out into space, or closed. For example, James Ehnes and Hilary Hahn look at their bows, but Itzhak Perlman and many others play with their eyes closed. I focus on the bow, but when someone is taking a video, I might close my eyes to remove the distractions.

Steve here. Indeed, I already play at least four orchestra concerts per year and a number of chamber performances. Busking provides a performance opportunity of a different sort by playing solo music which is more exposed and musically dense.

And yes, you're also correct that for some instruments, concerts are not easy to come by. Our orchestra has a wait list of 70 flutes! Our #1 organizational challenge is figuring out how to provide more performance opportunities to more people in a financially sustainable way.

(Incidentally, I have seen one solo flautist busking in Powell Station. He was a high school student.)

Steve here. That guy is great! Perfect idea for a trumpet. He's always standing on a bench/podium in the northwest corner of Union Square. His sound really projects; you can hear him from inside the 2-Muni bus that rides on Post.

I think that's a great idea. Electronic aids, despite the overhead, have a higher ceiling than a feeble acoustic violin. It can be more unique, more exotic, and more easily heard.

My focus on software is also 0-5 hours a day, and those hours are only before noon and after 10 pm.

Steve here. Thanks for reading! Those earnings are certainly not sustainable over eight hours in a day, nor over every day of the week. But they are attainable in strategically timed bursts. Some earnings are also skewed by a very few who donate $20.

For anyone interested in this area, the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS) [1] is full of papers on the so-called area of image forensics -- the identification of processing that has been performed upon an image, including resampling, rotation, JPEG compression, block processing, and more.

Consequently, another hot research area is image anti-forensics -- the obfuscation of such operations to avoid detection. (Shameless self-promotion: one example paper on anti-forensics of JPEG compression can be found here [2].)

[1] http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/publications/periodic...

[2] http://www.mirlab.org/conference_papers/International_Confer...

My first experience with Persona was through my mobile phone provider, Ting. They still use Persona: https://ting.com/account/login. I loved it then, and I love it now.

Off-topic, but your article's design looks beautiful. What did you use to generate it, e.g. a converted IPython notebook, or homemade CSS plus MathJax? And what did you use for the figures?

I glanced through the entire PDF. While it looks like an outstanding comprehensive overview to neural networks, it doesn't appear to really address NLP all that much, despite the title.

I would gladly welcome if you or someone could write a guide that has the comprehensiveness of the PDF above but with more NLP domain-specific discussion and concrete examples.

Hmm, interesting. Perhaps it is not worth it to "hire" a spectator to donate, but I think simply a spectator to stand around like an audience member can be more effective. That's another thing that often clusters; people who stop and listen. At really odd times, I'll look around and all of a sudden notice five people who stopped to listen.

Yeah, positioning is key. I do not disrupt traffic flow at all; for those who know Powell, I stand at the end of the long hallway on the 4th street side. That gets me a captive audience for about 30 yards. They have no choice but to listen to me on their way to the BART/Muni gates. Acoustics are good too.

Indoors, there is little chance of bills being blown away, but otherwise, I agree with you about coins. $1 coins are actually not that uncommon.

I busk solo violin in San Francisco's Powell Station -- 45 times since January 4, 2014. I last played on September 20 and made $51.02 per hour. My friends have encouraged me to write about my experiences onto Hacker News, but I never have.

You learn a lot about people and crowd dynamics. Donations come in clusters; if a person sees someone else donate, he/she is more likely to. In an attempt to teach empathy, mothers often give cash to their three-year old kid to put in the violin case. The few who drop a $10 or $20 are often over 40 years old.

Twice I've had money stolen, both by dudes in their late teens or early twenties.

Sound definitely matters; you can't just "look good". Busking at the Ferry Building was a bad idea; no one can hear you. I'll never do that again.

High-density foot traffic is not always a good thing. In the evening rush hour, there are so many people obstructing view and making noise that I imagine it's difficult to appreciate the music by the time you've reached the fare gates. I believe that a medium traffic density works best where the sound can travel and there is always a direct line of sight between pedestrian and performer.

Sometimes the "great works" make poor busking choices. The Bach Chaconne is a great example.

Unsurprisingly, an ensemble with more performers earns more than a soloist. On August 20, 2014, we played the Mendelssohn Octet in Powell Station and collectively made $461.64 over 90 minutes, or $307.76 per hour. However, that's $38.47 per hour per person. I make $15-50 per hour solo. So I wonder where the diminishing returns begin, i.e. what ensemble size maximizes revenue per hour per person.

Is it scary? The scariest part was leaving the apartment that first day. Exiting the apartment door was the point of no return. "Okay, I have my jacket and shoes on and my violin, I might as well go on with it." That moment when, for the first time, alone, I plopped my music stand in the middle of Embarcadero Station was one of the most uncomfortable moments of my life. However, once you start playing, that's easy. The music is the easy part.

If you want to busk but are scared, I recommend going at a less busy time, e.g. Saturday morning at 10 am. Get used to the surroundings; embrace your anxiety. Once you're comfortable, try again next week at 2 pm.

Slightly off-topic, but because I love this topic so much: there is a wonderful documentary called Pianomania about a piano tuner ("piano technician", if you will) to the stars. The story centers around a good-natured piano tuner and his seemingly impossible task of translating the pianists' vaguely expressed desires into a well-tuned piano. As the movie illustrates, piano tuning is just as much about timbre as it is about pitch -- perhaps even more so!

As I discovered just now, the whole thing is available on YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxEcifeMf08, only 1.5 hours, not 3 hours as the video incorrectly suggests].

Nowhere did they mention http://www.baseball.com/, the website I would have guessed was referred to by the title before I read the article.

... in part due to some hilariously complicit Hacker News accounts that are making serious-sounding comments. Not gonna lie; I was initially fooled.

http://musicinformationretrieval.com

A collection of instructional IPython notebooks related to music information retrieval.

Forgive the comment hijack, but for those interested in the basics of music information retrieval (MIR), I started to compile some notes on MIR as IPython notebooks here: http://musicinformationretrieval.com

It's clearly incomplete, but perhaps it might help someone. Pull requests are welcome.

For small personal transactions, I like Square Cash [1] because I can pay by sending a simple email. Deposits also seem to be pretty fast.

[1] https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5372-square-cash-wit...

Great idea! Although it appears that the Audio widget does not display correctly. Compare:

http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/stevetjoa/stanford-mir/bl...

https://github.com/stevetjoa/stanford-mir/blob/master/notebo...

Brief HN discussion on the same article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8124560

Recent HN discussion on another article about orchestral conductors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7687641

I have yet to go through it, but there is OnlineStatBook: http://onlinestatbook.com/index.html

Chapter 1: http://onlinestatbook.com/2/introduction/introduction.html

I'm sorry to report that, according to the Associated Press, Hari Simran Singh Khalsa has been found dead "in one of the narrow gorges or ravines that crisscross the rugged mountains in the colonial town of Tepoztlan."

http://www.seattlepi.com/news/world/article/American-missing...

http://www.wjla.com/articles/2015/01/hari-simran-sterling-ma...

A collection of IPython notebooks for music information retrieval (MIR). Work in progress: https://github.com/stevetjoa/stanford-mir

We began using these as instructional material at a summer workshop on MIR at CCRMA, Stanford [https://ccrma.stanford.edu/workshops/music-information-retri...]. For many years, we used Matlab, but we decided it was finally time to move over to Python. The GitHub repo includes a Vagrantfile that allows you to use Vagrant to provision a Virtualbox VM with all the audio libraries preloaded.

For included technologies, see the Vagrant box website: https://vagrantcloud.com/stevetjoa/boxes/stanford-mir/versio...

Your feedback, including pull requests and issues (and stars!), are most welcome.

Thanks for making this.

Relevant plug: I have a Vagrant box [1] and GitHub repo [2] containing IPython notebooks that we use in a workshop on music information retrieval. (Caution: the IPython notebooks are under heavy development, i.e. incomplete. If you have any feedback, please create a GitHub issue.) I just added pydub to the latest version of the Vagrant box [3].

The nice thing about this setup is that, regardless of your host OS, everybody has the same development environment so you don't have to go through the pains of installing numpy, scipy, scikit-learn, essentia, and more.

[1] https://vagrantcloud.com/stevetjoa/boxes/stanford-mir

[2] https://github.com/stevetjoa/stanford-mir

[3] https://vagrantcloud.com/stevetjoa/boxes/stanford-mir/versio...

Shameless self-promotion: in my Stack Overflow answer [1], I reference good introductory LSH papers [2-5].

In short, LSH is an algorithm that hashes points that are nearby in a feature space into the same bin with high probability. Contrast that with cryptographically secure hashes where the tiniest change in the input is designed to yield a completely different hash. The point is that, in domains like multimedia, you want to tolerate some distortions to your signal, e.g. microphone noise, blur, etc. These minor distortions shouldn't affect your characterization of the data, e.g. "is this a guitar", "is this a cat", etc.

The advantages are that it's simple to implement, and it has mathematically provable probability bounds and query complexity.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5751114/nearest-neighbors...

[2] http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr05/cos598E/bi...

[3] http://www.vldb.org/conf/1998/p194.pdf

[4] http://www.vldb.org/conf/1999/P49.pdf

[5] http://web.iitd.ac.in/~sumeet/Slaney2008-LSHTutorial.pdf

My reason is simple. I use Instacart frequently. When I first evaluated Google Shopping Express, it didn't seem possible to buy basic perishables such as milk and orange juice (and I don't mean the canned kind that sits on shelves at room temperature). That's pretty much a killer if I can't buy fresh milk and orange juice.

I like wash.io. I can't afford to use it every time (I think I've used it only three times so far?), but each instance left me satisfied. I find it especially useful for wash+press and dry cleaning where the alternative is to bring your clothes to a dry cleaner -- not convenient without a car.

A good strategy is to wash towels and pants yourself (these are heavier and therefore costlier to wash, and relatively easy to fold and put away yourself), and give the shirts and jackets to wash.io to wash, press, and fold.

Would someone here kindly be able to comment about the usability of Parse vs. Firebase vs. AWS JS SDK? I've looked into all three. They seem comparable because they are "no-backend" solutions and NoSQL stores.

It seems like the AWS JS SDK is the youngest, least mature (there are surprisingly few results on Google), and perhaps most difficult to use, but it's sure nice that I can manage my existing AWS stuff with a client-side JS SDK, now. If you use AWS JS SDK with DynamoDB, isn't it as if you've built your own Firebase?

You can think of the orchestra as a meta-instrument. Just like a violinist plays the violin, a conductor plays the orchestra.

Someone has to make the musical decisions. In a string quartet, it might be the first violin. In a baroque ensemble, as the article stated, it might be the harpsichordist. In a symphony, it's the conductor.

Sure, a conductor keeps time, but not so much during the performance itself. With enough practice, any professional orchestra should be able to keep time on its own, but during rehearsal, someone still needs to say exactly what that tempo is in the first place.

Having played with many amateur orchestras, currently rehearsing with one weekly, I've seen good and bad conductors. Just like a CEO or basketball coach or political leader, the conductor shares his/her vision of "success" yet knows the low-level technical details of the craft required to lead them there. The part about waving one's arms on stage has little to do with it.

An organization -- any organization -- acquires the characteristics of its leader. Therefore, one must not underestimate the importance of a good conductor.

Very cool!

Relevant: Zenph makes "re-performances" of old piano recordings. They take a recording, do music transcription magic to get the exact timings and velocities of each note event, and then feed that into a player piano. So it's as if you are listening to the ghost of Rachmaninov sitting at the piano, as shown here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eevzbV6Hkkk&t=28 (music starts at 0:28)

(I just visited http://zenph.com for the first time in about a year, and it appears that they've pivoted into a music education company.)