Listening to “Naima”: An Automated Structural Analysis of Music from Recorded Audio

A model of music listening has been automated. A program takes digital audio as input, for example from a compact disc, and outputs an explanation of the music in terms of repeated sections and the implied structure. For example, when the program constructs an analysis of John Coltrane’s “Naima,” it generates a description that relates to the AABA form and notices that the initial AA is omitted the second time. The algorithms are presented and results with two other input songs are also described. This work suggests that music listening is based on the detection of relationships and that relatively simple analyses can successfully recover interesting musical structure.