We propose string compressibility as a descriptor of temporal structure in
audio, for the purpose of determining musical similarity. Our descriptors are
based on computing track-wise compression rates of quantised audio features,
using multiple temporal resolutions and quantisation granularities. To verify
that our descriptors capture musically relevant information, we incorporate our
descriptors into similarity rating prediction and song year prediction tasks.
We base our evaluation on a dataset of 15500 track excerpts of Western popular
music, for which we obtain 7800 web-sourced pairwise similarity ratings. To
assess the agreement among similarity ratings, we perform an evaluation under
controlled conditions, obtaining a rank correlation of 0.33 between intersected
sets of ratings. Combined with bag-of-features descriptors, we obtain
performance gains of 31.1% and 10.9% for similarity rating prediction and song
year prediction. For both tasks, analysis of selected descriptors reveals that
representing features at multiple time scales benefits prediction accuracy.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures, 8 tables. Accepted versio
