Assessment of Perceptual Music Similarity

This paper extends a study on music similarity perception presented at ISMIR last year, in which subjects ranked the similarity of excerpt-pairs presented in triads [1]. The larger number of subjects and stimuli in the current study required a modification of the methodological strategy. We use here two nested incomplete block designs in order to cover the full set of song-excerpts comparisons (triads) while limiting the experimental time per subject. In addition to the two variable factors of the previous experiment, tempo and genre, we examine here the effect of prevalent instrument timbre. We found that 69 of 78 subjects where significantly consistent in their judgments of repeated triads. Furthermore, we found significant acrosssubject consistency on all 10 repeated triads. A significant difference was found in the distributions of interand intra-genre excerpt distances. The stress values in the Shepard’s plot shows evidence of increased complexity in the present study compared to the previous smaller study.