Salience

My master’s thesis (cand.philol.) has now been submitted to the University of Oslo: How Do We Recognize a Song in One Second? the Importance of Salience and Sound in Music Perception. Abstract This project started with the observation that we manage to recognize a song by listening to only a second of it. What perceptual and musical features make this possible, and can such features be used in music analysis and music information retrieval? These questions can be broken down to two main problems: a) segregation of sensory input and b) recognition of musical features. ...

For my thesis, I have been thinking a lot about the concept of “salience”. According to Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, salience comes from the Latin word salire that means to leap. The word is used with many connotations in different subjects, but generally it is related to something prominent or significant. Mathematical studies use salience as a term to describe a sudden change in the derivative of a function, as for example in (Large and Palmer 2002). ...