Using evolutionary algorithms to find the melody of a musical piece

Abstract

The melody of a piece of music contains the essence of that piece. Its study has been done for centuries, evolving side by side with other concepts and notions of music. However, musical analysis techniques are known to be analyst dependent (i.e., subjective), thus we propose a mathematical approach for characterizing the melody by fitting a curve to the pitch contour. This melody fitting will be calculated by an evolutionary algorithm, and we will use a wide set of musical pieces of many different styles to ground our claims. As a conclusion, we not only compute melodies out of a piece of music, but we also offer a new way of encapsulating components of this melody, what could lead to future applications in music composition and understanding.