Mining transposed motifs in music

Abstract

The discovery of frequent musical patterns (motifs) is a relevant problem in musicology. This paper introduces an unsupervised algorithm to address this problem in symbolically-represented musical melodies. Our algorithm is able to identify transposed patterns including exact matchings, i.e., null transpositions. We have tested our algorithm on a corpus of songs and the results suggest that our approach is promising, specially when dealing with songs that include non-exact repetitions