Efficient theme and non-trivial repeating pattern discovering in music databases

Proposes an approach for the fast discovery of all non-trivial repeating patterns in music objects. A repeating pattern is a sequence of notes which appears more than once in a music object. The longest repeating patterns in music objects are typically their themes. The themes and other non-trivial repeating patterns are important musical features which can be used both for content-based retrieval of music data and for music data analysis. We present a data structure called an RP-tree (repeating pattern tree) and its associated algorithms for the fast extraction of all non-trivial repeating patterns in a music object. Experiments are performed to compare this method with related approaches. The results are further analysed to show the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach.