Music compatibility models for interactive mashup applications

Music compatibility centres on the understanding of how to recombine musical audio signals to create novel and musically pleasing results. However, from a computational and theoretical perspective, music compatibility is poorly understood. Most existing tools (e.g. DJ-mixing software) are built around naive models of music understanding which only attempt to match tempo and key, and are thus restricted to harmonically and rhythmically stable electronic music. The Compmash project seeks to achieve disruptive breakthroughs in user-assisted music content recombination over a wide range of musical styles, by: identifying the "dimensions" of music compatibility – in relation to harmony, rhythm, instrumentation, and structure; understanding how these dimensions interact; mapping the role of long-term temporal structure for producing musically convincing results; and investigating how listeners perceive and enjoy mixed music compositions.