Bridging Music via Sound Effects

The prevalence of digital technologies allows people to easily create and share their own media contents, but sometimes we do not have handy tools to manipulate the media we want to create. For example, while creating personal films, a user may separately find the music segment that matches each part of the video, and then concatenate the segments to create the soundtrack that matches the visual contents along the timeline. However, one may lose the temporal coherence between consecutive music segments if the user just choose music segments that best match parts of the video contents. In this study, we focus on how to smoothly connect not-so-coherent music clips and make the transition natural and pleasant to hear. In particular, we improve the temporal smoothness by bar alignment and dual tempo adjustment. To further fit in with the transition between clips, we incorporate "sound effect insertion" which is a commonly used technique in popular song composition/remixing. In order to provide pleasant listening experience and systematically analyze the effectiveness of the proposed music bridging method, we have conducted specifically designed experiments to collect subjective opinions and reduce the cognitive loads of the participants. The experimental results indicate that with proper arrangement for creating smooth transition via tempo adjustment and sound effect insertion, the listening experience can be largely enhanced.