Methodological Considerations in Studies of Musical Similarity

There are many different aspects of musical similarity [7]. Some relate to acoustic properties, such as melodic [5], rhythmic [10], harmonic [9] and timbral [2]. Others are bound up in cultural aspects: artists involved in creation, year of first release, subject matter of lyrics, demographics of listeners, etc. In judgments about musical similarity, the relative importance of each of these aspects will change, not only for different listeners, but also for the same listener in different contexts [11]. Extra care must therefore be taken when designing studies in musical similarity to ensure that the context is an explicit variable. This paper describes the methodology behind our work in context-based musical similarity; introduces a novel system through which users can specify by example the context and focus of their retrieval needs; and details the design of a study to find parameters for our system which can also be adapted to test the system as a whole.