Abstract
Music exhibits structure at multiple scales, ranging from motifs to large-scale functional components. When inferring the structure of a piece, different listeners may attend to different temporal scales, which can result in disagreements when they describe the same piece. In the field of music informatics research (MIR), it is common to use corpora annotated with structural boundaries at different levels. By quantifying disagreements between multiple annotators, previous research has yielded several insights relevant to the study of music cognition. First, annotators tend to agree when structural boundaries are ambiguous. Second, this ambiguity seems to depend on musical features, time scale, and genre. Furthermore, it is possible to tune current annotation evaluation metrics to better align with these perceptual differences. However, previous work has not directly analyzed the effects of hierarchical structure because the existing methods for comparing structural annotations are designed for “flat” descriptions, and do not readily generalize to hierarchical annotations. In this paper, we extend and generalize previous work on the evaluation of hierarchical descriptions of musical structure. We derive an evaluation metric which can compare hierarchical annotations holistically across multiple levels. sing this metric, we investigate inter-annotator agreement on the multilevel annotations of two different music corpora, investigate the influence of acoustic properties on hierarchical annotations, and evaluate existing hierarchical segmentation algorithms against the distribution of inter-annotator agreement.
Highlights
Music is a highly structured information medium, containing sounds organized both synchronously and sequentially according to attributes such as pitch, rhythm, and timbre
For the remainder of this article, we summarize the agreement between two annotations by the F-measure, using precision and recall for pairwise classification, and over- and undersegmentation for normalized conditional entropy (NCE) metrics
In the calculation of all evaluation metrics, segment labels are sampled at a rate of 10 Hz, which is the standard practice for segmentation evaluation (Raffel et al, 2014)
Summary
Music is a highly structured information medium, containing sounds organized both synchronously and sequentially according to attributes such as pitch, rhythm, and timbre This organization of sound gives rise to various musical notions of harmony, melody, style, and form. These complex structures include multiple, inter-dependent levels of information that are hierarchically organized: from individual notes and chords at the lowest levels, to measures, motives and phrases at intermediate levels, to sectional parts at the top of the hierarchy (Lerdahl and Jackendoff, 1983). Listeners group together some elements of music based on Gestalt theory (Deutsch, 1999; Trehub and Hannon, 2006), and infants have been shown to differentiate between correctly and incorrectly segmented Mozart sonatas (Krumhansl and Jusczyk, 1990).
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