Content-based music structure analysis with applications to music semantics understanding

In this paper, we present a novel approach for music structure analysis. A new segmentation method, beat space segmentation, is proposed and used for music chord detection and vocal/instrumental boundary detection. The wrongly detected chords in the chord pattern sequence and the misclassified vocal/instrumental frames are corrected using heuristics derived from the domain knowledge of music composition. Melody-based similarity regions are detected by matching sub-chord patterns using dynamic programming. The vocal content of the melody-based similarity regions is further analyzed to detect the content-based similarity regions. Based on melody-based and content-based similarity regions, the music structure is identified. Experimental results are encouraging and indicate that the performance of the proposed approach is superior to that of the existing methods. We believe that music structure analysis can greatly help music semantics understanding which can aid music transcription, summarization, retrieval and streaming.