A Framework for Analysis of Music Similarity Measures

To analyze specific properties of music similarity measures that the commonly used genre classification evaluation procedure does not reveal, we introduce a MIDI based test framework for music similarity measures. We introduce the framework by example and thus outline an experiment to analyze the dependency of a music similarity measure on the instrumentation of a song compared to the melody, and to analyze its sensitivity to transpositions.

Using the outlined experiment, we analyze music similarity measures from three software packages, namely Marsyas, MA toolbox and Intelligent Sound Processing toolbox. The tested timbral similarity measures perform instrument recognition relatively well, although they are sensitive to transpositions and differences between sound fonts. The beat/rhythm/melody similarity measures are not always able to recognize the same melody played with different instruments.