2013:Discovery of Repeated Themes & Sections

Description

In brief: algorithms that take a single piece of music as input, and output a list of patterns repeated within that piece. Also known as intra-opus discovery (Conklin & Anagnostopoulou, 2001).

We would be happy to receive ideas for improving aspects of this task. Researchers with wiki accounts are able to post comments below or to edit the relevant sections, and researchers without wiki accounts are welcome to email me directly: tom.collins(a)jku.at

In more detail: for understanding and interpreting a musical work, the discovery of repeated patterns within that piece is a crucial step. Meredith, Lemström, and Wiggins (2002) cite Schenker (1954) as claiming repetition to be "the basis of music as an art" (p. 5), and also Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1983), who observe that "the importance of parallelism [i.e., repetition] in musical structure cannot be overestimated. The more parallelism one can detect, the more internally coherent an analysis becomes, and the less independent information must be processed and retained in hearing or remembering a piece" (p. 52).

On the very next page Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1983) acknowledge their "failure to flesh out the notion of parallelism," which is symptomatic of a more general failure in music psychology and music computing to address the discovery of repetition. Algorithms that take pieces of music as input, and output a list, visualisation, or summary of repeated patterns do exist (Collins, Thurlow, Laney, Willis, & Garthwaite, 2010; Conklin & Anagnostopoulou, 2001; Forth & Wiggins, 2009; Knopke & Jürgensen, 2009; Lartillot, 2005; Meek & Birmingham, 2003; Meredith et al., 2002; Müller & Jiang, 2012; Nieto, Humphrey, & Bello, 2012; Peeters, 2007), but the pattern discovery task has received less attention than many other tasks in MIR. Until now!