Genre classification using chords and stochastic language models

Abstract

Music genre meta-data is of paramount importance for the organisation of music repositories. People use genre in a natural way when entering a music store or looking into music collections. Automatic genre classification has become a popular topic in music information retrieval research both, with digital audio and symbolic data. This work focuses on the symbolic approach, bringing to music cognition some technologies, like the stochastic language models, already successfully applied to text categorisation. The representation chosen here is to model chord progressions as n-grams and strings and then apply perplexity and naïve Bayes classifiers, respectively, in order to assess how often those structures are found in the target genres. Some genres and sub-genres among popular, jazz, and academic music have been considered, trying to investigate how far can we reach using harmonic information with these models. The results at different levels of the genre hierarchy for the techniques employed are presented and discussed. © 2009 Taylor & Francis.