Abstract
Finding music pieces whose similarity is explainable in plain musical terms can be of considerable value in many applications. We propose a composition grouping method based on musicological approach. The underlying idea is to compare music notation to natural language. In music notation, a musical theme corresponds to a word. The more similar motives we find in two musical pieces, the higher is their overall similarity score. We develop the definition of a motive as well as the way to compare motives and whole compositions. To verify our framework we conduct a number of grouping and classification experiments for typical musical corpora. They include works by classical composers and examples of folk music. Obtained results are encouraging; the method is able to find non-obvious similarities, yet its operation remains explicable on the ground of music history. The proposed approach can be used in music recommendation and anti-plagiarism systems. Due to the musicological flavor, one of potentially best applications of our method would be that in computer assisted music analysis tools.
Highlights
Music and computer technologies specialists have been cooperating for a long time especially in the area of music analysis
Reading music by musicians is similar to reading natural language
Such a comparison seemingly opens the way to musical analysis based straight on existing natural language approaches and tools like Apache Mahout [31]
Summary
Music and computer technologies specialists have been cooperating for a long time especially in the area of music analysis. The abstract nature of musical language requires a context-aware approach to music analysis, which is difficult to present in machine language [1]. That is why musicologists are more interested in some specific application than just a computer representation of music [2]. One can find a number of scientific experiments showing that people focus on different elements of music depending in the task they have to to do [3]. It means that music analysis can be very contextual. The beauty of music lies in the non-obvious solutions that do not always obey logical rules
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