On musical performances identification, entropy and string matching

Abstract

In this paper we address the problem of matching musical renditions of the same piece of music also known as performances. We use an entropy based Audio-Fingerprint delivering a framed, small footprint AFP which reduces the problem to a string matching problem. The Entropy AFP has very low resolution (750 ms per symbol), making it suitable for flexible string matching. We show experimental results using dynamic time warping (DTW), Levenshtein or edit distance and the Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) distance. We are able to correctly (100%) identify different renditions of masterpieces as well as pop music in less than a second per comparison. The three approaches are 100% effective, but LCS and Levenshtein can be computed online, making them suitable for monitoring applications (unlike DTW), and since they are distances a metric index could be use to speed up the recognition process. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.