Rhythm analysis for personal and social music applications using drum loop patterns

The development of effective music retrieval and recommendation applications requires meaningful features for characterizing music audio. The rhythm of music audio in particular, besides timbre and melody, is essential in describing the music piece. This paper illustrates how drum loop patterns characterize the salient rhythm structure of music and an approach for drum loop pattern extraction is described. The extracted drum loop patterns are formed based on the temporal regularity (accent on meter) and drum types (bass and snare) of the beats and are good representations of the rhythmic dimension of music. The extracted drum loop patterns are useful for music segmentation and further work would include music classification and similarity matching.