On large-scale genre classification in symbolically encoded music by automatic identification of repeating patterns

Abstract

The importance of repetitions in music is well-known. In this paper, we study music repetitions in the context of effective and efficient automatic genre classification in large-scale music-databases. We aim at enhancing the access and organization of pieces of music in Digital Libraries by allowing automatic categorization of entire collections by considering only their musical content. We handover to the public a set of genre-specific patterns to support research in musicology. The patterns can be used, for instance, to explore and analyze the relations between musical genres.

There are many existing algorithms that could be used to identify and extract repeating patterns in symbolically encoded music. In our case, the extracted patterns are used as representations of the pieces of music on the underlying corpus and, consecutively, to train and evaluate a classifier to automatically identify genres. In this paper, we apply two very fast algorithms enabling us to experiment on large and diverse corpora. Thus, we are able to find patterns with strong discrimination power that can be used in various applications. We carried out experiments on a corpus containing over 40,000 MIDI files annotated with at least one genre. The experiments suggest that our approach is scalable and capable of dealing with real-world-size music collections.