From close-listening to distant-listening: Developing tools for Speech-Music discrimination of Danish music radio

Iben Have, Kenneth Enevoldsen
Last updated on Mar 15, 2021
PDF Cite Source Document

Abstract

Digitization has changed flow music radio. Competition from music streaming services like Spotify and iTunes has to a large extend outperformed traditional playlist radio, and the global dissemination of software generated playlists in public service radio stations in the 1990s has superseded the passionate music radio host. But digitization has also changed the way we can do research in radio. In Denmark digitization of almost all radio programming back to 1989, have made it possible to actually listen to the archive to investigate how radio content has changed historically. This article investigates the research question: How has the distribution of music and talk on the Danish Broadcasting Corporation’s radio channel P3 developed 1989-2019 by comparing a qualitative case study with a new large-scale study. Methodologically this shift from a close listening to a few programs to large-scale distant listening to more than 65,000 hours of radio enables us to discuss and critically compare the methods, results, strengths and shortcomings of the two analysis. Previous studies have demonstrated that Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) trained for image recognition of spectograms of the audio outperforms alternative approaches, such as Support Vector Machines (SVMs). The large-scale study presented shows that the CNN-based approach generalizes well, even without fine-tuning, to speech and music classification in Danish radio, with an overall accuracy of 98%.

Twitter Thread

Kenneth Enevoldsen
Kenneth Enevoldsen
PhD student in Multimodal Representation Learning

My research interests is in multimodal representation learning with application in decision support systems in Psychiatry and in the Covid-19 response.