A Scape Plot Representation for Visualizing Repetitive Structures of Music Recordings

The development of automated methods for revealing the repetitive structure of a given music recording is of central importance in music information retrieval. In this paper, we present a novel scape plot representation that allows for visualizing repetitive structures of the entire music recording in a hierarchical, compact, and intuitive way. In a scape plot, each point corresponds to an audio segment identified by its center and length. As our main contribution, we assign to each point a color value so that two segment properties become apparent. Firstly, we use the lightness component of the color to indicate the repetitiveness of the encoded segment, where we revert to a recently introduced fitness measure. Secondly, we use the hue component of the color to reveal the relations between different segments. To this end, we introduce a novel grouping procedure that automatically maps related segments to similar hue values. By discussing a number of popular and classical music examples, we illustrate the potential and visual appeal of our representation and also indicate limitations.