Melodic String Matching via Interval Consolidation and Fragmentation

Abstract

Abstract. In this paper, we address the problem of melodic string matching that enables identification of varied (ornamented) instances of a given melodic pattern. To this aim, a new set of edit distance operations adequate for pitch interval strings is introduced. Insertion, deletion and replacement operations are abolished as irrelevant. Consolidation and fragmentation are retained, but adapted to the pitch interval domain, i.e., two or more intervals of one string may be matched to an interval from a second string through consolidation or fragmentation. The melodic interval string matching problem consists of finding all occurrences of a given pattern in a melodic sequence that takes into account exact matches, consolidations and fragmentations of intervals in both the sequence and the pattern. We show some properties of the problem and an algorithm that solves this problem is proposed.

Fragmentations with Pitch, Rhythm and Parallelism Constraints for Variation Matching

“…Fragmentations and consolidations may be a further way to handle some aspects of musical pattern transformation [6,23]. In [2], Barton et al proposed to focus only on consolidation and fragmentation operations on pitch intervals: the sum of several consecutive intervals in one melodic sequence should equal an interval in another sequence. Their algorithm identifies correctly variations, including transposed ones, of a given reduced pattern, but incorrectly matches a large number of false positives, the consolidation and the fragmentation being applied only on the pitch domain.…”