Generalized N-gram Measures for Melodic Similarity

Abstract

In this paper we propose three generalizations of well-known N-gram approaches for measuring similarity of single-line melodies. In a former paper we compared around 50 similarity measures for melodies with empirical data from music psychological experiments. Similarity measures based on edit distances and N-grams always showed the best results for different contexts. This paper aims at a generalization of N-gram measures that can combine N-gram and other similarity measures in a fairly general way.