Repeating Pattern Discovery and Structure Analysis from Acoustic Music Data

Music and songs usually have repeating patterns and prominent structure. The automatic extraction of such repeating patterns and structure is useful for further music summarization, indexing and retrieval. In this paper, an effective approach of repeating pattern discovery and structure analysis of acoustic music data is proposed. In order to represent the melody similarity more accurately, in our approach, Constant Q transform is utilized in feature extraction and a novel similarity measure between musical features is proposed. From the self-similarity matrix of the music, an adaptive method is then presented to extract all significant repeating patterns. Based on the obtained repetitions, musical structure is further analyzed using a few heuristic rules. Finally, an optimization-based approach is proposed to determine the accurate boundary of each musical section. Evaluations on various music pieces indicate our approach is promising.