About

Marsyas (Music Analysis, Retrieval and Synthesis for Audio Signals) is an open source software framework for audio processing with specific emphasis on Music Information Retrieval applications. It has been designed and written by George Tzanetakis (gtzan@cs.uvic.ca) with help from students and researchers from around the world. Marsyas has been used for a variety of projects in both academia and industry.

Featured Project

last.fm

"At last.fm we used Marsyas to design and validate prototypes, and to quickly test ideas. The latest version dramatically improved its quality and performance - if you are doing serious MIR your should definitely give it a try!" - Norman Casagrande, Head of Music Research

Featured Developer

Gabrielle Odowichuk

Affiliation : University of Victoria

I am pursuing a MASc under the supervision of George Tzanetakis and Peter Driessen at the University of Victoria. My work is in the field of audio signal processing, and I used Marsyas to process real-time audio signals for sound localization using a microphone array. I've written my very own MarSystem to perform cross-correlation, and will use Marsyas for many more projects in years to come. Yay, Marsyas!

Featured Web Demo

CAL500 CAL500

The CAL500 dataset is a collection of songs curated by Doug Turnbull which has 500 songs of a variety of genres, each of which has been tagged with a variety of semantic tags by human listeners.

We recently used Marsyas to predict tags for each of the songs in this collection using a new technique called stacked generalization. Check it out at cal500.sness.net.

Featured Video

MarPanning

MarPanning is a 3D application that allows you to see the left/right panning for different frequency bins of an audio file. It's written in C++ using the Marsyas audio framework, Qt and OpenGL. The y-axis (up and down) shows the different frequency bins, with low frequencies at the bottom and high frequencies at the top. The x-axis (left to right) shows the Stereo Panning Index, as calculated by Marsyas for each frequency bin. The z-axis shows time. The dots are coloured green and are small if there is just low energy in that bin, and grow in size and get more yellow the more energy there is in that bin. The song that is playing is "In My Life" by the Beatles and produced by George Martin. The song starts with the guitar panned hard left, and you can see the different frequencies for the notes appearing from bottom to top. If you look closely, you can even see the melody about halfway up the screen. You can see and hear the vocals come in on the right later in the song. MarPanning is completely open source and under the GPL licence. You can play with it yourself by downloading and installing Marsyas.