Structural analysis of musical signals via pattern matching

A musical piece typically has repetitive structures. Analysis of this structure can be used for music indexing, thumbnailing or segmentation. The described research aims at automatically analyzing the repetitive structure of musical signals. First, we detect the repetition of each segment in a piece using dynamic programming. Second, we summarize this repetition information and infer the structure based on some heuristic rules. The performance of our approach is demonstrated visually using figures for qualitative evaluation, and by two structural similarity measures for quantitative evaluation. The experimental results using a corpus of Beatles' songs show that automatic structural analysis of music is possible.