The notion of musical similarity is particularly complex because there are numerous dimensions of similarity. If similarity takes place between different fragments from one musical piece, a musical similarity implies a
repetition of the first occurring fragment. As well, eventually, the similarity does not occur by direct repetition, but by presenting in two (or more) set of relations, some common values or patterns. Objective musical similarity can be based on musical features such as:
Pitched parameters
*
Pitch interval similarity
*
Melodic similarity
*
Modulation
Signal modulation is the process of varying one or more properties of a periodic waveform in electronics and telecommunication for the purpose of transmitting information.
The process encodes information in form of the modulation or message ...
pattern similarity
*
Timbral similarity
Non-pitched parameters
*
Metrical structure similarity
*
Rhythm
Rhythm (from Greek , ''rhythmos'', "any regular recurring motion, symmetry") generally means a " movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions". This general meaning of regular r ...
ic pattern similarity
*
Section structure similarity
Semiotic parameters
*
Modality
Modality may refer to:
Humanities
* Modality (theology), the organization and structure of the church, as distinct from sodality or parachurch organizations
* Modality (music), in music, the subject concerning certain diatonic scales
* Modalit ...
structure similarity
*
Extensional similarity
*
Intension
In any of several fields of study that treat the use of signs—for example, in linguistics, logic, mathematics, semantics, semiotics, and philosophy of language—an intension is any property or quality connoted by a word, phrase, or another s ...
al similarity
Nevertheless, similarity can be based also on less objective features such as musical genre, personal history, social context (e.g. music from the 1960s), and a priori knowledge.
Similarity is relevant also in
music information retrieval.
Finally, musical similarity can be extended to the comparison between musical gestures in performance and composition.
Applications
Automatic methods of musical similarity detection based on
data mining
Data mining is the process of extracting and finding patterns in massive data sets involving methods at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and database systems. Data mining is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and ...
and
co-occurrence In linguistics, co-occurrence or cooccurrence is an above-chance frequency of ordered occurrence of two adjacent terms in a text corpus. Co-occurrence in this linguistic sense can be interpreted as an indicator of semantic proximity or an idio ...
analysis has been developed in order to classify music titles for electronic music distribution.
[ François Pachet, Geert Westermann, Damien Laigre]
Musical Data Mining for Electronic Music Distribution
. Proceedings of the 1st WedelMusic Conference, pp. 101-106, Firenze, Italy, 2001.
References
Music theory
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