First-Order Logic Classi cation Models of Musical Genres Based on Harmony

Submitted by amelie on Tue, 10/13/2009 - 16:30.

Publication Type:

Conference Paper

Authors:

Anglade, A.; Ramirez, R.; Dixon, S.

Source:

Proceedings of the 6th Sound and Music Computing Conference (SMC 2009), Porto, Portugal, p.309-314 (2009)

Abstract:

We present an approach for the automatic extraction of transparent classification models of musical genres based on harmony. To allow for human-readable classification models we adopt a first-order logic representation of harmony and musical genres: pieces of music are represented as lists of chords and musical genres are seen as context-free definite clause grammars using subsequences of these chord lists. To induce the context-free definite clause grammars characterising the genres we use a first-order logic decision tree induction algorithm, Tilde. We test this technique on 856 Band in a Box files representing academic, jazz and popular music. We perform 2-class and 3-class classification tasks on this dataset and obtain good classification results: around 66% accuracy for the 3-class problem and between 72% and 86% accuracy for the 2-class problems. A preliminary analysis of the most common rules extracted from the decision tree models built during these experiments reveals a list of interesting and/or well-known jazz, academic and popular music harmony patterns.