Stream segregation algorithm for pattern matching in polyphonic music databases

As music can be represented symbolically, most of the existing methods extend some string matching algorithms to retrieve musical patterns in a music database. However, not all retrieved patterns are perceptually significant because some of them are, in fact, inaudible. Music is perceived in groupings of musical notes called streams. The process of grouping musical notes into streams is called stream segregation. Stream-crossing musical patterns are perceptually insignificant and should be pruned from the retrieval results. This can be done if all musical notes in a music database are segregated into streams and musical patterns are retrieved from the streams. Findings in auditory psychology are utilized in this paper, in which stream segregation is modelled as a clustering process and an adapted single-link clustering algorithm is proposed. Supported by experiments on real music data, streams are identified by the proposed algorithm with considerable accuracy.

Man Hon WongEmail: