Modeling musical style with language models for composer recognition

Abstract

In this paper we present an application of language modeling using n-grams to model the style of different composers. For this, we repeated the experiments performed in previous works by other authors using a corpus of 5 composers from the Baroque and Classical periods. In these experiments we found some signs that the results could be influenced by external factors other than the composers' styles, such as the heterogeneity in the musical forms selected for the corpus. In order to assess the validity of the modeling techniques to capture the own personal style of the composers, a new experiment was performed with a corpus of fugues from Bach and Shostakovich. All these experiments show that language modeling is a suitable tool for modeling musical style, even when the styles of the different datasets are affected by several factors. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.