From Low-Level to High-Level: Comparative Study of Music Similarity Measures

Studying the ways to recommend music to a user is a central task within the music information research community. From a content-based point of view, this task can be regarded as obtaining a suitable distance measurement between songs defined on a certain feature space. We propose two such distance measures. First, a low-level measure based on tempo-related aspects, and second, a high-level semantic measure based on regression by support vector machines of different groups of musical dimensions such as genre and culture, moods and instruments, or rhythm and tempo. We evaluate these distance measures against a number of state-of-the-art measures objectively, based on 17 ground truth musical collections, and subjectively, based on 12 listeners’ ratings. Results show that, in spite of being conceptually different, the proposed methods achieve comparable or even higher performance than the considered baseline approaches. Furthermore, they open up the possibility to explore distance metrics that are based on truly semantic notions.