Closed Patterns in Folk Music and Other Genres

In this extended abstract, we would like to present the concept of the ‘closed pattern’ from computer science and use it to investigate patterns in folk music. We also show how the quantity of patterns can be different comparing to other genres. We use three symbolic music databases: The Essen Folksong Collection (Schaffrath & Huron, 1995), The Jazz Tune Collection (Rodr´ıguez L´opez et al., 2015), and Bach’s chorales (Sapp, 2005)

A comparative evaluation of algorithms for discovering translational patterns in Baroque keyboard works

We consider the problem of intra-opus pattern discovery, that is, the task of discovering patterns of a specified type within a piece of music. A music analyst undertook this task for works by Domenico Scarlattti and Johann Sebastian Bach, forming a benchmark of 'target' patterns. The performance of two existing algorithms and one of our own creation, called SIACT, is evaluated by comparison with this benchmark. SIACT out-performs the existing algorithms with regard to recall and, more often than not, precision. It is demonstrated that in all but the most carefully selected excerpts of music, the two existing algorithms can be affected by what is termed the 'problem of isolated membership'. Central to the relative success of SIACT is our intention that it should address this particular problem. The paper contrasts string-based and geometric approaches to pattern discovery, with an introduction to the latter. Suggestions for future work are given

Music Synchronization, Audio Matching, Pattern Detection, and User Interfaces for a Digital Music Library System

Over the last two decades, growing efforts to digitize our cultural heritage could be observed. Most of these digitization initiatives pursuit either one or both of the following goals: to conserve the documents - especially those threatened by decay - and to provide remote access on a grand scale. For music documents these trends are observable as well, and by now several digital music libraries are in existence. An important characteristic of these music libraries is an inherent multimodality resulting from the large variety of available digital music representations, such as scanned score, symbolic score, audio recordings, and videos. In addition, for each piece of music there exists not only one document of each type, but many. Considering and exploiting this multimodality and multiplicity, the DFG-funded digital library initiative PROBADO MUSIC aimed at developing a novel user-friendly interface for content-based retrieval, document access, navigation, and browsing in large music collections. The implementation of such a front end requires the multimodal linking and indexing of the music documents during preprocessing. As the considered music collections can be very large, the automated or at least semi-automated calculation of these structures would be recommendable. The field of music information retrieval (MIR) is particularly concerned with the development of suitable procedures, and it was the goal of PROBADO MUSIC to include existing and newly developed MIR techniques to realize the envisioned digital music library system. In this context, the present thesis discusses the following three MIR tasks: music synchronization, audio matching, and pattern detection. We are going to identify particular issues in these fields and provide algorithmic solutions as well as prototypical implementations. In Music synchronization, for each position in one representation of a piece of music the corresponding position in another representation is calculated. This thesis focuses on the task of aligning scanned score pages of orchestral music with audio recordings. Here, a previously unconsidered piece of information is the textual specification of transposing instruments provided in the score. Our evaluations show that the neglect of such information can result in a measurable loss of synchronization accuracy. Therefore, we propose an OCR-based approach for detecting and interpreting the transposition information in orchestral scores. For a given audio snippet, audio matching methods automatically calculate all musically similar excerpts within a collection of audio recordings. In this context, subsequence dynamic time warping (SSDTW) is a well-established approach as it allows for local and global tempo variations between the query and the retrieved matches. Moving to real-life digital music libraries with larger audio collections, however, the quadratic runtime of SSDTW results in untenable response times. To improve on the response time, this thesis introduces a novel index-based approach to SSDTW-based audio matching. We combine the idea of inverted file lists introduced by Kurth and Müller (Efficient index-based audio matching, 2008) with the shingling techniques often used in the audio identification scenario. In pattern detection, all repeating patterns within one piece of music are determined. Usually, pattern detection operates on symbolic score documents and is often used in the context of computer-aided motivic analysis. Envisioned as a new feature of the PROBADO MUSIC system, this thesis proposes a string-based approach to pattern detection and a novel interactive front end for result visualization and analysis

Rhetorical Pattern Finding

In this paper, we research rhetorical patterns from a musicological and computational standpoint. First, a theoretical examination of what constitutes a rhetorical pattern is conducted. Out of that examination, which includes primary sources and the study of the main composers, a formal definition of rhetorical patterns is proposed. Among the rhetorical figures, a set of imitative rhetorical figures is selected for our study, namely, epizeuxis, palilogy, synonymia, and polyptoton. Next, we design a computational model of the selected rhetorical patterns to automatically find those patterns in a corpus consisting of masses by Renaissance composer Tomás Luis de Victoria. In order to have a ground truth with which to test out our model, a group of experts manually annotated the rhetorical patterns. To deal with the problem of reaching a consensus on the annotations, a four-round Delphi method was followed by the annotators. The rhetorical patterns found by the annotators and by the algorithm are compared and their differences discussed. The algorithm reports almost all the patterns annotated by the experts and some additional patterns. The algorithm reports almost all the patterns annotated by the experts (recall: 98.11%) and some additional patterns (precision: 71.73%). These patterns correspond to rhetorical patterns within other rhetorical patterns, which were overlooked by the annotators on the basis of their contextual knowledge. These results pose issues as to how to integrate that contextual knowledge into the computational model

GenoMeMeMusic: A Memetic-based Framework for Discovering the Musical Genome

(Abstract to follow