First crowdsourcing platform for music description calls on public to support AI research

AI researchers at Queen Mary University of London and UPF in Barcelona are building a dataset that will enable the development of better music description tools - but they need music fans' help. Song Describer is a collaborative platform for people to write descriptions of music under Creative Commons licenses, creating an open database of music with natural language description. As the database grows, it will support artificial intelligence research efforts in developing systems that combine natural language and audio processing to generate music captions automatically, among other applications. Through Song Describer, researchers from Queen Mary's C4DM (Centre for Digital Music) and the Music Technology Group at UPF (Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona) are enabling the collection of textual descriptions of different songs, from genre, tone, emotions evoked by a melody, to instrumentation. This public database of more than 10,000 pieces of music with their corresponding descriptions, can be used by the scientific community to develop, train and validate artificial intelligence models in the field of music description. Song Describer is a crowdsourcing platform open to everyone, with no need for specialist musical knowledge. Researchers are calling on the public to support the project by writing descriptions of songs in English, with prizes available for the most active contributors.