Metodo

International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy

Series | Book | Chapter

226965

Probabilistic segmentation of musical sequences using restricted Boltzmann machines

Stefan LattnerMaarten GrachtenKat AgresCarlos Eduardo Cancino Chacón

pp. 323-334

Abstract

A salient characteristic of human perception of music is that musical events are perceived as being grouped temporally into structural units such as phrases or motifs. Segmentation of musical sequences into structural units is a topic of ongoing research, both in cognitive psychology and music information retrieval. Computational models of music segmentation are typically based either on explicit knowledge of music theory or human perception, or on statistical and information-theoretic properties of musical data. The former, rule-based approach has been found to better account for (human annotated) segment boundaries in music than probabilistic approaches [14], although the statistical model proposed in [14] performs almost as well as state-of-the-art rule-based approaches. In this paper, we propose a new probabilistic segmentation method, based on Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM). By sampling, we determine a probability distribution over a subset of visible units in the model, conditioned on a configuration of the remaining visible units. We apply this approach to an n-gram representation of melodies, where the RBM generates the conditional probability of a note given its (n-1) predecessors. We use this quantity in combination with a threshold to determine the location of segment boundaries. A comparative evaluation shows that this model slightly improves segmentation performance over the model proposed in [14], and as such is closer to the state-of-the-art rule-based models.

Publication details

Published in:

Collins Tom, Meredith David, Volk Anja (2015) Mathematics and computation in music: 5th international conference, MCM 2015, London, UK, June 22-25, 2015. Dordrecht, Springer.

Pages: 323-334

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-20603-5_33

Full citation:

Lattner Stefan, Grachten Maarten, Agres Kat, Cancino Chacón Carlos Eduardo (2015) „Probabilistic segmentation of musical sequences using restricted Boltzmann machines“, In: T. Collins, D. Meredith & A. Volk (eds.), Mathematics and computation in music, Dordrecht, Springer, 323–334.