Finding Repeated Patterns in Music: State of Knowledge, Challenges, Perspectives

Abstract

This paper discusses the current state of knowledge on musical pattern discovery. Various studies propose computational methods to find repeated musical patterns. Our detailed review of these studies reveals important challenges in musical pattern discovery research: different methods have not yet been directly compared, and the influence of music representation and filtering on the results has not been assessed. Moreover, we need a thorough understanding of musical patterns as perceived by human listeners. A sound evaluation methodology is still lacking. Consequently, we suggest perspectives for musical pattern discovery: future research can provide a comparison of different methods, and an assessment of different music representations and filtering criteria. A combination of quantitative and qualitative methods can overcome the lacking evaluation methodology. Musical patterns discovered by human listeners form a reference, but also an object of study, as computational methods can help us understand the criteria underlying human notions of musical repetition.

Evaluating the Role of Repeated Patterns in Folk Song Classification and Compression

“…For the remainder of this paper, we call finding repetitions in a single song Song Pattern Discovery and finding repetitions across multiple songs Tune Family Pattern Discovery. 2 We refer the reader to Janssen et al (2013) for a recent overview of pattern discovery algorithms. Since 2014, the yearly MIREX task on the Discovery of Repeated Themes and Sections helps in evaluating the output of such algorithms and makes it possible to compare them.…”

Computational Fugue Analysis

“…Discovering patterns in music is an established field of MIR research (Jansen et al 2014). Several studies have focused on finding maximal repeating patterns, thus discarding patterns that are subpatterns of a larger pattern that occurs with the same frequency as the sub-patterns (Hsu, Liu, and Chen 1998;Liu, Hsu, and Chen 1999;Karydis, Nanopoulos, and Manolopoulos 2007).…”

A Wavelet-Based Approach to Pattern Discovery in Melodies

“…Various computational methods for discovering patterns in music have been developed over the past two decades (see Janssen et al, 2013, for a recent review), but only recently have attempts been made to compare their outputs in a rigorous way.…”