A Content-Based Music Similarity Function

We present a method to compare songs based solely on their audio content. Our technique forms a signature for each song based on K-means clustering of spectral features. The signatures can then be compared using the Earth Mover’s Distance [14] which allows comparison of histograms with disparate bins. Preliminary objective and subjective results on a database of over 8000 songs are encouraging. For 20 songs judged by two users, on average 2.5 out of the top 5 songs returned were judged similar. We also found that our measure is robust to simple corruption of the audio signal and that meaningful visualizations of the data are possible using this similarity measure. Author email: [email protected], [email protected] c Compaq Computer Corporation, 2001 This work may not be copied or reproduced in whole or in part for any commercial purpose. Permission to copy in whole or in part without payment of fee is granted for nonprofit educational and research purposes provided that all such whole or partial copies include the following: a notice that such copying is by permission of the Cambridge Research Laboratory of Compaq Computer Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts; an acknowledgment of the authors and individual contributors to the work; and all applicable portions of the copyright notice. Copying, reproducing, or republishing for any other purpose shall require a license with payment of fee to the Cambridge Research Laboratory. All rights reserved. CRL Technical reports are available on the CRL’s web page at http://crl.research.compaq.com. Compaq Computer Corporation Cambridge Research Laboratory One Cambridge Center Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142 USA