A Comparison of Timbral and Harmonic Music Segmentation Algorithms

Four music segmentation algorithms are presented, one based on purely timbral features, one on purely harmonic features, and two on different combinations of features. They are compared against each other and against human annotations of two albums by The Beatles. Example segmentations are given together with a quantitative measure of boundary accuracy. No algorithm is found to be clearly superior, although examples suggest that the combined algorithms can offer improved boundary detection.