Using chroma histogram to measure the perceptual similarity of music

Automatic evaluation of perceptual similarity is crucial for music retrieval. However, previous works mainly focused on the similarity of timbre and rhythm but not the musical pattern of a song, such as melody and chord. In this paper, we propose a new feature, chroma histogram, to summarize the musical pattern and use a transposition-invariant matching method to compare two chroma histograms. Experiment results demonstrate the efficiency of this method in measuring the similarity of musical pattern.