Discovering Musical Structure in Audio Recordings

Music is often described in terms of the structure of repeated phrases. For example, many songs have the form AABA, where each letter represents an instance of a phrase. This research aims to construct descriptions or explanations of music in this form, using only audio recordings as input. A system of programs is described that transcribes the melody of a recording, identifies similar segments, clusters these segments to form patterns, and then constructs an explanation of the music in terms of these patterns. Additional work using spectral information rather than melodic transcription is also described. Examples of successful machine “listening” and music analysis are presented.