Lecture: Music Structure Analysis

After working through the material of this lecture, you should be able to answer the following questions:

• What are the general principles for segmenting and structuring music recordings?
• How can musical forms be described and encoded?
• Which musical and acoustical properties may determine structural segments? What are suitable feature representations that capture these properties?
• What is the difference between a cost measure and a similarity measure?
• What is the definition of a self-similarity matrix (SSM)?
• Which structural properties are encoded by paths, blocks, and block corners visible in SSMs?
• How can a segment, a path, and a block be modeled mathematically? What are induced segments of a path or block? How can one define a score of a path or block? (See Eq. 4.4 to Eq. 4.10).
• What is a general pipeline for music structure analysis?
• What is the basic idea of a novelty-based approach for finding segment boundaries? What is a checkerboard kernel? What is a novelty function? (See Eq. 4.38 and Eq. 4.43.)
• In which way does the novelty function depend on the size of the checkerboard kernel?

Reading Assignments

• Chapter 4, Müller, FMP, Springer 2021
  • Introduction to Chapter 4
• Section 4.1: General Principles
  • Section 4.1.1: Segmentation and Structure Analysis
  • Section 4.1.2: Musical Structure
  • Section 4.1.3: Musical Dimensions
• Section 4.2: Self-Similarity Matrices
  • Section 4.2.1: Basic Definitions and Properties
• Section 4.4: Novelty-Based Segmentation
  • Section 4.4.1: Novelty Detection

FMP Notebooks

• Part 4: Music Structure Analysis
• Music Structure Analysis: General Principles
• Self-Similarity Matrix (SSM)
• SSM: Synthetic Generation
• Novelty-Based Segmentation

Slides

• Music Structure Analysis: Slides (PDF), Handouts (6 slides per page) (PDF)

Videos

There are a number of nicely made videos on song structures and musical forms. Here is a selection.

• Song Structure in Music Explained (How To Arrange Your Songs) (6:00)
  Song structure; "Out of Love" by Cinzia & The Eclipse; introduction; verse; pre-chorus; chorus; repeating sections; bridge; outro; dynamic; texture; musical forms
• The Anatomy of a Song (4:22)
  Chorus; hook; memorability; emotional impact; verse; story telling; lyrics; variety; changing instrumentation; bridge; breakup; new musical ideas
• What is Sonata Form? (5:07)
  Exposition; development; recapitulation; primary theme; second theme; different keys
• All About Rondo Form in Music (8:58)
  Theme; main part; interspersed episodes; ABACABA; tonal structure; third movement of Beethoven's Pathétique Sonata

Question & Answer Session