Abstract
Voice Separation is a delicate stage in a music information retrieval process intended to be used in the automated music analysis processes through textual segmentation or for the indexation of a music score. This article presents a method that is capable of separating polyphonic music, considered in its symbolic aspect, into its individual parts (or voices). This method considers every single note as an individual entity and assigns it to the part (or voice) where the information content that it assumes in relation to the already-existing notes of the same score is maximum. The algorithm may separate the voices identifying them even in the points that intersect. The algorithm was tested against a handful of musical works that were carefully selected from the repertoire of Bach and of Mendelssohn.
Highlights
Computerized music analysis is an constantly-changing discipline, both thanks to the consequences originating from technology research and to the ongoing influences deriving from the study of cognitive sciences
Focusing on the comprehension of the brain processes involved in the musical activities [1][2], the latter may assume a decisive role in the analysis of the computerized music analysis
In the Information Theory, the entropy measures the quantity of uncertainty or of information existing in a random signal
Summary
Computerized music analysis is an constantly-changing discipline, both thanks to the consequences originating from technology research and to the ongoing influences deriving from the study of cognitive sciences. This article presents a method that, drawing inspiration from the preceding studies, is able to reconstruct the various voices of a polyphonic composition, by reading the sounds from a MIDI file: every single note is considered as an individual entity and inserted into the voice where the information content that it assumes in relation to the already-existing sounds in the same score is maximum It is a system based on two clearly distinct principles: a musical one, related to the structure of the thematic material (interval structure - distance between various sounds) and a mathematical-statistical one, derived from the Information Theory elaborated by Weaver and Shannon [8], tied to the possibility of transition from one interval to the other.
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