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
Repetition may refer to:
*Repetition (rhetorical device), repeating a word within a short space of words
* Repetition (bodybuilding), a single cycle of lifting and lowering a weight in strength training
*Working title for the 1985 slasher film '' ...
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 pattern similarity
*
Timbral similarity
Non-pitched parameters
*
Metrical structure similarity
*
Rhythm
Rhythm (from Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed ...
ic pattern similarity
*
Section structure similarity
Semiotic parameters
*
Modality structure similarity
*
Extensional similarity
*
Intensional 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 and
co-occurrence In linguistics, co-occurrence or cooccurrence is an above-chance frequency of occurrence of two terms (also known as coincidence or concurrence) from a text corpus alongside each other in a certain order. Co-occurrence in this linguistic sense ...
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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