Computational Models of Music Similarity and their ... - OFAI

Acknowledgments
This work was carried out while I was working as a researcher at the Austrian
Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI). I want to thank Gerhard
Widmer for giving me the opportunity to work at OFAI and supervising me.
His constant feedback and guidance have shaped this thesis from the wording
of the title to the structure of the conclusions. I want to thank Andreas
Rauber for reviewing this thesis, for convincing me to start working on MIR
in the first place (back in 2001), and for his supervision during my Master’s
studies.
Colleagues at OFAI
I want to thank my colleagues at OFAI for lots of interesting discussions, various
help, and making life at OFAI so enjoyable: Simon Dixon, Werner Goebl,
Dominik Schnitzer, Martin Gasser, Søren Tjagvad Madsen, Asmir Tobudic,
Paolo Petta, Markus Mottl, Fabien Gouyon, and those who have moved to
Linz in the meantime: Tim Pohle, Peter Knees, and Markus Schedl. I especially
want to thank: Simon for pointers to related work, help with signal
processing, Linux, English expressions, lots of useful advice, and helpful comments
on this thesis; Werner for introducing me to the fascinating world of
expressive piano performances; Dominik for some very inspiring discussions
and for the collaboration on industry projects related to this thesis; Martin
for helping me implement the “Simple Playlist Generator” and for lots
of help with Java; Paolo for always being around when I was looking for
someone to talk to; Arthur for interesting discussions related to statistical
evaluations; Markus M. for help with numerical problems, Fabien for interesting
discussions related to rhythm features and helpful comments on this
thesis; Tim for the collaboration on feature extraction and playlist generation;
Peter for the collaboration on web-based artist similarity; and Markus
S. for the collaboration on visualizations. I also want to thank the colleagues
from the other groups at OFAI, the system administrators, and the always
helpful secretariat. It was a great time and I would have never managed to
complete this thesis without all the help I got.
Other Colleagues
I want to thank Xavier Serra and Mark Sandler for inviting me to visit their
labs where I had the chance to get to know many great colleagues. I want to
thank Perfecto Herrera for all his help during my visit to the Music Technology
Group at UPF, for his help designing and conducting listening tests (to