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Composer | Pianist | Music Informatics

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How Can I Use Isomer?

How Can I Use Isomer?

posted on May 25, 2017

Isomer’s flexible architecture makes it ideal for a wide range of research, creative, and industry applications. The current application roadmap focuses on musical applications, however, there’s nothing to prevent Isomer’s representation and processing algorithms from being applied to other multi-vector, time series data.

While not the current focus, exploration into non-musical applications is also under consideration.

Industry Applications

Audio Tagging
Isomer can correlate audio tracks from a music library with detailed, human-generated descriptions of mood, texture, and commercial usage. From there, Isomer can apply this learned taxonomy to new audio tracks (as metadata) for use in text-based search engines. This application may also be used to clean and unify existing metadata across multiple libraries.
SFX Classifier
Isomer can classify one-shot audio files from a sound effect library based on pitch content (melodic or harmonic), timbral trends, rhythmic profile, and/or length.
Symbolic Similarity
Isomer is capable of comparing symbolic (MIDI) files for similarity in terms of melodic or rhythmic contour, motivic or harmonic content, and more. Because Isomer’s representations are perceptual in nature, close (but not exact) copies can be detected using a user-defined threshold.
Audio Search
Isomer can directly compare audio files for similarity in terms of pitch (melodic or harmonic), timbral, and/or rhythmic trends.

Creative Applications

Music Composition
Isomer’s ability to convert existing music into highly precise or abstract perceptual models makes it ideal for developing a library of musical models. Once analyzed, these models can be used in any number of ways to influence novel musical output. Over time, and in combination with machine learning techniques, the system may be capable of developing unique compositional styles.
Sonification
By deconstructing an audio signal into its component parts and then recombining and orchestrating these parts, Isomer can generate output (either symbolic or audio) to creatively imitate the original source signal.
Sample Replacement
A single seed sample can generate a list of similar options from a user-defined library based on fundamental pitch content (melodic), harmonic trends, timbral trends, rhythmic profile, and/or length.
Automated Orchestration
Using either symbolic or audio models tagged with human-generated descriptions, Isomer can orchestrate musical ideas for either score or audio rendering.

 

Can I Use Isomer In My Own Projects?

Unfortunately, Isomer isn’t available for public use. At least not yet.

While the software has proven to be extremely robust (development is test-driven with long-run reliability and portability as primary goals), the modules are currently managed via CLI. In other words, by modern standards, it’s incredibly cumbersome to use.

This is by design, however. Top priority is to keep the system maximally flexible while work is completed on all modules and I discover the strengths and weaknesses of the system. Once testing is completed, I’ll look at releasing feature-limited versions of Isomer for use in various environments and applications.

Of course, I’m always open to new ideas, so if you have a something in mind, feel free to contact me with details.

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