Perceptual Issues in Music Pattern Recognition: Complexity of Rhythm and Key Finding

We consider several perceptual issues in the context of machine recognition of music patterns. It is argued that a successful implementation of a music recognition system must incorporate perceptual information and error criteria. We discuss several measures of rhythm complexity which are used for determining relative weights of pitch and rhythm errors. Then, a new method for determining a localized tonal context is proposed. This method is based on empirically derived key distances. The generated key assignments are then used to construct the perceptual pitch error criterion which is based on note relatedness ratings obtained from experiments with human listeners.