Discovery of repeated vocal patterns in polyphonic audio: A case study on flamenco music

Abstract

This paper presents a method for the discovery of repeated vocal patterns directly from music recordings. At a first stage, a voice detection algorithm provides a rough segmentation of the recording to vocal parts, based on which an estimate of the average pattern duration is computed. Then, a pattern detector which employs a sequence alignment algorithm is used to yield a ranking of pairs of matches of the detected voiced segments. At a last stage, a clustering algorithm produces the final repeated patterns. Our method was evaluated in the context of flamenco music for which symbolic metadata are very hard to produce, yielding very promising results.