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

Dancing Robot with Marsyas

Marsyas is being used as the rhythmic interface beyond dancing robots, under a PhD project at LIACC - Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science Laboratory, and INESC Porto; which began in 2008. This research focus on multidisciplinary aspects of interactive music and dancing robotic systems, and its applications, being mainly founded on the interconnection of music, rhythm, perception, emotion, movement, and interaction in an expression of dance, as a form of art and sonification. Till date we developed a Lego-NXT-based robot, which uses Marsyas to analyze low-level aspects of rhythm, through onset detection, embodying the resultant rhythmic events with user-defined dance movements. I would like to express my gratitude to the MARSYAS' comunity for making this possible. - João Lobato Oliveira, PhD student at FEUP, Porto, Portugal.

Featured Developer

Tiago F. Tavares

Affiliation : University of Campinas

I'm a PhD candidate in the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) and I will be visiting UVic, here in Victoria-BC, for one year. I have been working with automatic transcription of audio for some years now, and I hope to contribute with the development of Marsyas as much as I can. I have written some documentation, and let's see what patches I will do in the future!

Featured Web Demo

Panning Pedagogy Panning Pedagogy

A Flash application that, using Marsyas, takes audio data, calculates the spectrum for the left and right channels, and calculates the Stereo Panning Spectrum from this data. It is then graphically displayed in a web application. Look for similar programs inside of Marsyas that display this data using 3D OpenGL.

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.