A Measure of Melodic Similarity based on a Graph Representation of the Music Structure

Content-based music retrieval requires to define a similarity measure between music documents. In this paper, we propose a novel similarity measure between melodic content, as represented in symbolic notation, that takes into account musicological aspects on the structural function of the melodic elements. The approach is based on the representation of a collection of music scores with a graph structure, where terminal nodes directly describe the music content, internal nodes represent its incremental generalization, and arcs denote the relationships among them. The similarity between two melodies can be computed by analyzing the graph structure and finding the shortest path between the corresponding nodes inside the graph. Preliminary results in terms of music similarity are presented using a small test collection.