Abstract. Considering that M.I.R. content-extraction algorithms are evaluated over annotated test-sets, it is worth discussing the robustness of the concepts used for these annotations. In this paper we discuss the robustness of local music annotations, more specifically “Music Structure” annotation. We define four conditions to be fulfilled by an annotation method to provide robust local annotation. We propose mathematical formulations of two of them. We then measure these criteria on existing “Music Structure ” test-sets and discuss the pro’s and con’s of each test-set. From these, we derive a robust set of concepts which form a “multi-dimensional ” description of the “Music Structure”. We then apply this description to a set of 300 tracks representing various music genres and discuss the results.
