A music similarity function based on signal analysis

We present a method to compare songs based solely on their audio content. Our technique forms a signature for each song based on K-means clustering of spectral features. The signatures can then be compared using the Earth Mover's Distance [1] which allows comparison of histograms with disparate bins. Preliminary objective and subjective results on a database of over 8000 songs are encouraging. For 20 songs judged by two users, on average 2.5 out of the top 5 songs returned were judged similar. We also found that our measure is robust to simple corruption of the audio signal.