SyncGlobal

Music Annotation Tool

With music markets shifting, the commercial use of music in video productions for film, TV or ads worldwide grows increasingly important. Our novel research project “SyncGlobal” addresses this global music licensing opportunity by developing adequate search technologies to efficiently handle sync licensing requests and to find the best acoustic or semantic matches to any video sequence from large-scale  intercultural music catalogues.  Moreover, an advanced authoring environment will enable interactive previews during the music selection process with minimum human efforts involved. Smart,  cross-catalogue sync-search applications will not only facilitate the work for music supervisors and film producers or speed-up and improve professional music search results. The almost unlimited access to distributed online catalogues is expected to further stimulate the whole music licensing market through better competition and more applicable license and pricing models.

Why Time-Aware Metadata?

The future of successful music marketing will depend on how well a music catalogue connects with online databases, search tools and applications. Public or exclusive, B2B or B2C: in order to be found in the digital media world, you need professional metadata - multifaceted, detailed and interoperable. As music and video, both are temporal streams which exhibit varying semantic qualities over time, such content descriptions need to be accurately assigned along the time-line of the music or video in order to meet the requirements of sync-search requests and other sequence-based use of music.

Sync-Search Paradigm and Cross-Modal Semantic Mapping

As an extension of today’s state-of-the-art audiovisual search engines the SyncGlobal project is currently developing advanced time-aware analysis methods for music and video. Their purpose is to capture temporal structures, smooth gradients or progressions of musical, visual or perceptual properties as well as specific salient events within a sound file or a video clip. Instead of just searching for tracks that roughly fit the requested qualities, our Sync-Search engine will find particular sound segments that are exactly in sync with the desired temporal semantics. This is essential for linking music and video in a meaningful way. Supported sync-searc  criteria involve among others musical as well as visual rhythmic patterns, mood gradients and even the occurrences of “catchy words”, which will be detected in the sung lyrics automatically using a novel word-spotting technology for music.

Music Annotation Tool

As said before, your tracks need professional metadata in order to be found online. We want to encourage you as a content owner or distributer to contribute to our research. The advantages for you are manifold, reaching from enriched, validated metadata to an early access to the technological innovations achieved in our project. We offer you a software tool for advanced tag editing to gather timeaware music descriptions according to your own metadata needs. The tool is designed to be  configurable according to your own metadata schema. It supports manual annotations by signal-based automated functionality, including song segmentation and segment similarity. Get ready to share details about your tracks with platforms and distributors. Improve your music’s performance in recommendation systems and online marketing in the future!