Automated analysis of musical structure

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2005.Includes bibliographical references (p. 93-96).Listening to music and perceiving its structure is a fairly easy task for humans, even for listeners without formal musical training. For example, we can notice changes of notes, chords and keys, though we might not be able to name them (segmentation based on tonality and harmonic analysis); we can parse a musical piece into phrases or sections (segmentation based on recurrent structural analysis); we can identify and memorize the main themes or the catchiest parts - hooks - of a piece (summarization based on hook analysis); we can detect the most informative musical parts for making certain judgments (detection of salience for classification). However, building computational models to mimic these processes is a hard problem. Furthermore, the amount of digital music that has been generated and stored has already become unfathomable. How to efficiently store and retrieve the digital content is an important real-world problem. This dissertation presents our research on automatic music segmentation, summarization and classification using a framework combining music cognition, machine learning and signal processing. It will inquire scientifically into the nature of human perception of music, and offer a practical solution to difficult problems of machine intelligence for automatic musical content analysis and pattern discovery.(cont.) Specifically, for segmentation, an HMM-based approach will be used for key change and chord change detection; and a method for detecting the self-similarity property using approximate pattern matching will be presented for recurrent structural analysis. For summarization, we will investigate the locations where the catchiest parts of a musical piece normally appear and develop strategies for automatically generating music thumbnails based on this analysis. For musical salience detection, we will examine methods for weighting the importance of musical segments based on the confidence of classification. Two classification techniques and their definitions of confidence will be explored. The effectiveness of all our methods will be demonstrated by quantitative evaluations and/or human experiments on complex real-world musical stimuli.by Wei Chai.Ph.D

Melody retrieval on the Web

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2001.Includes bibliographical references (p. 87-90).The emergence of digital music on the Internet requires new information retrieval methods adapted to specific characteristics and needs. While music retrieval based on the text information, such as title, composers, or subject classification, has been implemented in many existing systems, retrieval of a piece of music based on musical content, especially an incomplete, imperfect recall of a fragment of the music, has not yet been fully explored. This thesis will explore both theoretical and practical issues involved in a web-based melody retrieval system. I built a query-by-humming system, which can find a piece of music in the digital music repository based on a few hummed notes. Since an input query (hummed melody) may have various errors due to uncertainty of the user's memory or the user's singing ability, the system should be able to tolerate errors. Furthermore, extracting melodies to build a melody database is also a complicated task. Therefore, melody representation, query construction, melody matching and melody extraction are critical for an efficient and robust query-by-humming system. Thus, these are the main tasks to be addressed in the thesis. Compared to previous systems, a new and more effective melody representation and corresponding matching methods which combined both pitch and rhythmic information were adopted, a whole set of tools and deliverable software were implemented, and experiments were conducted to evaluate the system performance as well as to explore other melody perception issues. Experimental results demonstrate that our methods incorporating rhythmic information rather than previous pitch-only methods did help improving the effectiveness of a query-by-humming system.by Wei Chai.S.M