Alignment

While sequence alignment algorithms are usually independent of the application domain, this chapter looks at music alignment, specifically audio‐to‐audio and audio‐to‐score alignment algorithms. It introduces a standard task‐agnostic approach to sequence alignment, the dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithm, and then provides an overview of standard approaches to audio‐to‐audio alignment and audio‐to‐score alignment. The objective of DTW is to align or to synchronize two sequences of different length. Audio‐to‐audio alignment describes the process of retrieving corresponding points in time between two audio signals with the same or a similar content. The objective in evaluating alignment systems is the comparison of two sequences of time‐stamps and how well they match each other.