Unifying Low-Level and High-Level Music Similarity Measures

Measuring music similarity is essential for multimedia retrieval. For music items, this task can be regarded as obtaining a suitable distance measurement between songs defined on a certain feature space. In this paper, we propose three of such distance measures based on the audio content: first, a low-level measure based on tempo-related description; second, a high-level semantic measure based on the inference of different musical dimensions by support vector machines. These dimensions include genre, culture, moods, instruments, rhythm, and tempo annotations. Third, a hybrid measure which combines the above-mentioned distance measures with two existing low-level measures: a Euclidean distance based on principal component analysis of timbral, temporal, and tonal descriptors, and a timbral distance based on single Gaussian Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) modeling. We evaluate our proposed measures against a number of baseline measures. We do this objectively based on a comprehensive set of music collections, and subjectively based on listeners´ ratings. Results show that the proposed methods achieve accuracies comparable to the baseline approaches in the case of the tempo and classifier-based measures. The highest accuracies are obtained by the hybrid distance. Furthermore, the proposed classifier-based approach opens up the possibility to explore distance measures that are based on semantic notions.