Harmonic style-based song retrieval using N-gram

Abstract

N-gram models have been successfully applied to harmonic analysis for differentiating a composer's style based on all the pieces in a large corpus of the composer. In this paper, we focus on each individual song and explore the effectiveness of the n-gram model when it is applied to a different but equally important musical task: harmonic style-based song retrieval. A chord profile is generated for a song by using the n-gram model as the descriptor of the song's harmonic features. The system retrieves songs based on the similarity between the chord profile in the query and that of the songs in the database. The retrieval result is evaluated in terms of a style-based retrieval score as well as traditional information retrieval metrics such as precision and recall. Finally, we list the most common pop-rock chord patterns from the most frequently retrieved songs, and compare the patterns with those described in previous works.