A New Compatibility Measure for Harmonic EDM Mixing

Abstract

We explore the applicability of a new harmonic compatibility (HC) measure in the field of DJ’s harmonic mixing. We present a system that complements harmonic mixing by calculating the HC between the tracks of a user-defined music collection. The user must define a target track for which the calculation is to be made, and obtains the HC values with respect to each track in the collection, expressed as a percentage. The system also calculates a pitch transposition interval for each candidate track that, if applied, maximizes the HC with respect to the target track. To analyse the tracks, they are first source-separated to remove the percussive elements, with no melodic information. A single chroma vector is computed as the mean of the NNLSChroma from each frame, that then is converted into a Tonal Interval Vector (TIV). The HC is calculated as the small-scale measure score between the pairs TIVs of candidate and target track. The system is implemented with a graphical user interface (GUI) that allows running on a parallel window next to the DJ software of choice, allowing the program to be incorporated into the DJ’s live performances. The implementation allows real-time calculation of the HC, each time a new target track is selected. The suggestions of the system are evaluated in an experiment where musically trained participants are asked about their preference between pairwise comparisons of mixes.