Abstract
To find occurrences of melodic segments, such as themes,
phrases and motifs, in musical works, a well-performing
similarity measure is needed to support human analysis of
large music corpora. We evaluate the performance of a
range of melodic similarity measures to find occurrences
of phrases in folk song melodies. We compare the similarity
measures correlation distance, city-block distance, Euclidean
distance and alignment, proposed for melody comparison
in computational ethnomusicology; furthermore
Implication-Realization structure alignment and B-spline
alignment, forming successful approaches in symbolic melodic
similarity; moreover, wavelet transform and the geometric
approach Structure Induction, having performed
well in musical pattern discovery. We evaluate the success
of the different similarity measures through observing
retrieval success in relation to human annotations. Our results
show that local alignment and SIAM perform on an
almost equal level to human annotators.
phrases and motifs, in musical works, a well-performing
similarity measure is needed to support human analysis of
large music corpora. We evaluate the performance of a
range of melodic similarity measures to find occurrences
of phrases in folk song melodies. We compare the similarity
measures correlation distance, city-block distance, Euclidean
distance and alignment, proposed for melody comparison
in computational ethnomusicology; furthermore
Implication-Realization structure alignment and B-spline
alignment, forming successful approaches in symbolic melodic
similarity; moreover, wavelet transform and the geometric
approach Structure Induction, having performed
well in musical pattern discovery. We evaluate the success
of the different similarity measures through observing
retrieval success in relation to human annotations. Our results
show that local alignment and SIAM perform on an
almost equal level to human annotators.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 16th ISMIR Conference, Málaga, Spain, October 26-30, 2015 |
| Place of Publication | Malaga, Spain |
| Publisher | ISMIR press |
| Pages | 659-665 |
| Publication status | Published - 2015 |