Representations of Music in Ranking Rhythmic Hypotheses

Abstract

AbstractThe chapter presents first the main issues related to music information retrieval (MIR) domain. Within this domain, there exists a variety of approaches to musical instrument recognition, musical phrase classification, melody classification (e.g. query-by-humming systems), rhythm retrieval, retrieval of high-level-musical features such as looking for emotions in music or differences in expressiveness, music search based on listeners’ preferences, etc. The objective of this study is to propose a method for retrieval of hypermetric rhythm on the basis of melody. A stream of sounds in MIDI format is introduced at the system input. On the basis of a musical content the method retrieves a hypermetric structure of rhythm of a musical piece consisting of rhythmic motives, phrases, and sentences. On the basis of the hypermetric structure retrieved, a system capable of creating automatic drum accompaniment to a given melody supporting the composition is proposed. A method does not use any information about rhythm (time signature), which is often included in MIDI information. Neither rhythmic tracks nor harmonic information are used in this method. The only information analyzed is a melody, which may be monophonic as well as polyphonic. The analysis starts after the entire piece has been played. Recurrence of melodic and rhythmic patterns and the rhythmic salience of sounds are combined to create an algorithm that finds the metric structure of rhythm in a given melody.KeywordsSalience FunctionRhythmic PatternMusical PieceMusic Information RetrievalMelodic ContourThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.