Investigating the role of musical genre in human perception of music stretching resistance

To stretch a music piece to a given length is a common demand in people’s daily lives, e.g., in audio-video synchronization and animation production. However, it is not always guaranteed that the stretched music piece is acceptable for general audience since music stretching suffers from people’s perceptual artefacts. Over-stretching a music piece will make it uncomfortable for human psychoacoustic hearing. The research on music stretching resistance attempts to estimate the maximum stretchability of music pieces to further avoid over-stretch. It has been observed that musical genres can significantly improve the accuracy of automatic estimation of music stretching resistance, but how musical genres are related to music stretching resistance has never been explained or studied in detail in the literature. In this paper, the characteristics of music stretching resistance are compared across different musical genres. It is found that music stretching resistance has strong intra-genre cohesiveness and inter-genre discrepancies in the experiments. Moreover, the ambiguity and the symmetry of music stretching resistance are also observed in the experimental analysis. These findings lead to a new measurement on the similarity between different musical genres based on their music stretching resistance. In addition, the analysis of variance (ANOVA) also supports the findings in this paper by verifying the significance of musical genre in shaping music stretching resistance.