A chorus-section detecting method for musical audio signals

This paper describes a method for obtaining a list of chorus (refrain) sections in compact-disc recordings of popular music. The detection of chorus sections is essential for the computational modeling of music understanding and is useful in various applications, such as automatic chorus-preview functions in music browsers or retrieval systems. Most previous methods detected as a chorus a repeated section of a given length and had difficulty in identifying both ends of a chorus section and in dealing with modulations (key changes). By analyzing relationships between various repeated sections, our method called RefraiD can detect all the chorus sections in a song and estimate both ends of each section. It can also detect modulated chorus sections by introducing a similarity that enables modulated repetition to be judged correctly. Experimental results with a popular-music database show that this method detects the correct chorus sections in 80 of 100 songs.