The Prague Stringology Conference 2002

Costas S. Iliopoulos and Masahiro Kurokawa

String Matching with Gaps for Musical Melodic Recognition

Abstract:
Here, we have designed and implemented algorithms for string matching with gaps for musical melodic recognition on polyphonic music using bit-wise operations. Music analysts are often concerned with finding occurrences of patterns (motifs), or repetitions of the same pattern, possibly with variations, in a score. An important example of flexibility required in score searching arises from the nature of polyphonic music. Within a certain time span each of the simultaneously-performed voices in a musical composition does not, typically, contain the same number of notes. So `melodic events' occurring in one voice may be separated from their neighbours in a score by intervening events in other voices. Since we cannot generally rely on voice information being present in the score we need to allow for temporal `gaps' between events in the matched pattern.

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