Abstract
The task of recognizing a composer by listening to a musical piece used to be reserved for experts in music theory. The problems we address here are, first, that of constructing an automatic system that is able to distinguish between music written by different composers; and, second, identifying the musical properties that are important for this task. We take a data-driven approach by scanning a large database of existing music and develop five types of classification model that can accurately discriminate between three composers (Bach, Haydn and Beethoven). More comprehensible models, such as decision trees and rulesets, are built, as well as black-box models such as support vector machines. Models of the first type offer important insights into the differences between composer styles, while those of the second type provide a performance benchmark.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Backer, E. and van Kranenburg, P. (2005). On musical stylometry—a pattern recognition approach. Pattern Recognition Letters, 26(3):299–309.
Berenzweig, A., Logan, B., Ellis, D., and Whitman, B. (2004). A large-scale evaluation of acoustic and subjective music-similarity measures. Computer Music Journal, 28(2):63–76.
Bohak, C. and Marolt, M. (2009). Calculating similarity of folk song variants with melody-based features. In Proceedings of the 10th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR), pages 597–602, Kobe, Japan.
Casey, M., Veltkamp, R., Goto, M., Leman, M., Rhodes, C., and Slaney, M. (2008). Content-based music information retrieval: Current directions and future challenges. Proceedings of the IEEE, 96(4):668–696.
CCARH (2012). KernScores, http://kern.ccarh.org. Last accessed: November 2012.
Chang, C.-C. and Lin, C.-J. (2011). LIBSVM: A library for support vector machines. ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST), 2(3):27.
Chew, E., Volk, A., and Lee, C.-Y. (2005). Dance music classification using inner metric analysis. In Golden, B. L., Raghaven, S., andWasil, E. A., editors, The Next Wave in Computing, Optimization, and Decision Technologies, pages 355–370. Springer.
Cohen, W. (1995). Fast effective rule induction. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Machine Learning, pages 115–123, Tahoe City, CA.
Conklin, D. and Witten, I. H. (1995). Multiple viewpoint systems for music prediction. Journal of New Music Research, 24(1):51–73.
Cosi, P., De Poli, G., and Lauzzana, G. (1994). Auditory modelling and selforganizing neural networks for timbre classification. Journal of New Music Research, 23(1):71–98.
Cristianini, N. and Shawe-Taylor, J. (2000). An Introduction to Support Vector Machines and Other Kernel-Based Learning Methods. Cambridge University Press.
DeNora, T. (1997). Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna, 1792-1803. University of California Press.
Downie, J. (2003). Music information retrieval. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 37(1):295–340.
Eerola, T., Järvinen, T., Louhivuori, J., and Toiviainen, P. (2001). Statistical features and perceived similarity of folk melodies. Music Perception, 18(3):275–296.
Eerola, T. and Toiviainen, P. (2004). MIR in Matlab: The Midi Toolbox. In Proceedings of 6th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR 2005), pages 22–27, London, UK.
Fawcett, T. (2004). ROC graphs: Notes and practical considerations for data mining researchers. Technical Report HPL-2003-4, HP Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA.
Friedman, J., Hastie, T., and Tibshirani, R. (2000). Additive logistic regression: A statistical view of boosting (with discussion and a rejoinder by the authors). The Annals Of Statistics, 28(2):337–407.
Geertzen, J. and van Zaanen, M. (2008). Composer classification using grammatical inference. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Machine Learning and Music (MML 2008), pages 17–18, Helsinki, Finland.
Gheyas, I. and Smith, L. (2010). Feature subset selection in large dimensionality domains. Pattern Recognition, 43(1):5–13.
Ghias, A., Logan, J., Chamberlin, D., and Smith, B. (1995). Query by humming: Musical information retrieval in an audio database. In Proceedings of the Third ACM International Conference on Multimedia, pages 231–236, San Francisco, CA.
Greene, D. (1985). Greene’s Biographical Encyclopedia of Composers. The Reproducing Piano Roll Foundation. Edited by Alberg M. Petrak.
Guyon, I., Weston, J., Barnhill, S., and Vapnik, V. (2002). Gene selection for cancer classification using support vector machines. Machine Learning, 46(1-3):389–422.
Hall, M., Frank, E., Holmes, G., Pfahringer, B., Reutemann, P., and Witten, I. (2009). The Weka data mining software: An update. ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter, 11(1):10–18.
Herlands, W., Der, R., Greenberg, Y., and Levin, S. (2014). A machine learning approach to musically meaningful homogeneous style classification. In Proceedings of the 28th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-14), pages 276–282, Quebec, Canada.
Herremans, D., Martens, D., and Sörensen, K. (2014). Dance hit song prediction. Journal of New Music Research, 43(3):291–302.
Herremans, D., Sörensen, K., and Martens, D. (2015). Classification and generation of composer-specific music using global feature models and variable neighborhood search. Computer Music Journal, 39(3). In press.
Hillewaere, R., Manderick, B., and Conklin, D. (2009). Global feature versus event models for folk song classification. In Proceedings of the 10th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2009), Kobe, Japan.
Hillewaere, R., Manderick, B., and Conklin, D. (2010). String quartet classification with monophonic models. In Proceedings of the 11th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2010), Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Hillewaere, R., Manderick, B., and Conklin, D. (2012). String methods for folk tune genre classification. In Proceedings of the 13th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2012), pages 217–222, Porto, Portugal.
Hontanilla, M., Pèrez-Sancho, C., and Iñesta, J. (2013). Modeling musical style with language models for composer recognition. In Sanchez, J. M., Micó, L., and Cardoso, J., editors, Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis: 6th Iberian Conference, IbPRIA 2013, Funchal, Madeira, Portugal, June 5–7. 2013, Proceedings, volume 7887 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 740–748. Springer.
Huang, W., Nakamori, Y., and Wang, S.-Y. (2005). Forecasting stock market movement direction with support vector machine. Computers & Operations Research, 32(10):2513–2522.
Huron, D. (2002). Music information processing using the Humdrum Toolkit: Concepts, examples, and lessons. Computer Music Journal, 26(2):11–26.
Jesser, B. (1991). Interaktive Melodieanalyse. Peter Lang.
John, G. and Langley, P. (1995). Estimating continuous distributions in Bayesian classifiers. In Proceedings of the Eleventh conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, pages 338–345, Montreal, Canada.
Kaliakatsos-Papakostas, M., Epitropakis, M., and Vrahatis, M. (2011). Weighted Markov chain model for musical composer identification. In Chio, C. D., Cagnoni, S., Cotta, C., Ebner, M., and et al., A. E., editors, Applications of Evolutionary Computation, volume 6625 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 334–343. Springer.
Kassler, M. (1966). Toward musical information retrieval. Perspectives of New Music, 4(2):59–67.
Landwehr, N., Hall, M., and Frank, E. (2005). Logistic model trees. Machine Learning, 59(1-2):161–205.
Laurier, C., Grivolla, J., and Herrera, P. (2008). Multimodal music mood classification using audio and lyrics. In Seventh International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA’08), pages 688–693, La Jolla, CA.
Lewis, D. (1998). Naive (Bayes) at forty: The independence assumption in information retrieval. In Nedellec, C. and Rouveirol, C., editors, Machine Learning: ECML-98, volume 1398 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 4–15. Springer.
Li, X., Ji, G., and Bilmes, J. (2006). A factored language model of quantized pitch and duration. In International Computer Music Conference (ICMC 2006), pages 556–563, New Orleans, LA.
Mandel, M. and Ellis, D. (2005). Song-level features and support vector machines for music classification. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR 2006), pages 594–599, London, UK.
Martens, D. (2008). Building acceptable classification models for financial engineering applications. SIGKDD Explorations, 10(2):30–31.
Martens, D., Baesens, B., Van Gestel, T., and Vanthienen, J. (2007). Comprehensible credit scoring models using rule extraction from support vector machines. European Journal of Operational Research, 183(3):1466–1476.
Martens, D. and Provost, F. (2014). Explaining data-driven document classifications. MIS Quarterly, 38(1):73–99.
Martens, D., Van Gestel, T., and Baesens, B. (2009). Decompositional rule extraction from support vector machines by active learning. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 21(2):178–191.
McKay, C. and Fujinaga, I. (2004). Automatic genre classification using large highlevel musical feature sets. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR 2004), Barcelona, Spain.
McKay, C. and Fujinaga, I. (2006). jSymbolic: A feature extractor for MIDI files. In Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC 2006), pages 302–5, New Orleans, LA.
McKay, C. and Fujinaga, I. (2007). Style-independent computer-assisted exploratory analysis of large music collections. Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies, 1(1):63–85.
McKay, C. and Fujinaga, I. (2008). Combining features extracted from audio, symbolic and cultural sources. In Proceedings of the 9th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2008), pages 597–602, Philadelphia, PA.
McKay, C. and Fujinaga, I. (2009). jMIR: Tools for automatic music classification. In Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC 2009), pages 65–8, Montreal, Canada.
Mearns, L., Tidhar, D., and Dixon, S. (2010). Characterisation of composer style using high-level musical features. In Proceedings of 3rd International Workshop on Machine Learning and Music, pages 37–40, Florence, Italy.
Mendel, A. (1969). Some preliminary attempts at computer-assisted style analysis in music. Computers and the Humanities, 4(1):41–52.
Moreno-Seco, F., Inesta, J., Ponce de León, P. J., and Mic´o, L. (2006). Comparison of classifier fusion methods for classification in pattern recognition tasks. In Yeung, D.-Y., Kwok, J. T., Roli, A. F. F., and de Ridder, D., editors, Structural, Syntactic, and Statistical Pattern Recognition: Joint IAPR International Workshops, SSPR 2006 and SPR 2006, Hong Kong, China, August 17–19, 2006. Proceedings, volume 4109 of LNCS, pages 705–713. Springer.
Pearce, M., Conklin, D., and Wiggins, G. (2005). Methods for combining statistical models of music. In Kronland-Martinet, R., Voinier, T., and Ystad, S., editors, Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval, volume 3902 of LNCS, pages 295–312. Springer.
Pérez-Sancho, C., Rizo, D., and Inesta, J. M. (2008). Stochastic text models for music categorization. In da Vitoria Lobo, N. and others, editors, Structural, Syntactic, and Statistical Pattern Recognition, volume 5342 of LNCS, pages 55–64. Springer.
Pfeiffer, S., Fischer, S., and Effelsberg, W. (1997). Automatic audio content analysis. In Proceedings of the 4th ACM International Conference on Multimedia, pages 21–30, Boston, MA.
Pollastri, E. and Simoncelli, G. (2001). Classification of melodies by composer with hidden Markov models. In Web Delivering of Music, 2001. Proceedings. First International Conference on, pages 88–95. IEEE.
Ponce de Léon, P. J. and I˜nesta, J. (2003). Feature-driven recognition of music styles. In Perales, F. J., Campilho, A. J. C., de la Blanca, N. P., and Sanfeliu, A., editors, Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis: First Iberian Conference, IbPRIA 2003, Puerto de Andratx, Mallorca, Spain, volume 2652 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 773–781. Springer.
Quinlan, J. (1993). C4.5: Programs for Machine Learning, volume 1. Morgan Kaufmann.
Ramirez, R., Maestre, E., Perez, A., and Serra, X. (2011). Automatic performer identification in Celtic violin audio recordings. Journal of New Music Research, 40(2):165–174.
Rosen, C. (1997). The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, volume 1. Norton.
Ruggieri, S. (2002). Efficient C4. 5 [classification algorithm]. Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on, 14(2):438–444.
Sapp, C. (2005). Online database of scores in the Humdrum file format. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR 2005), pages 664–665, London, UK.
Shmueli, G. and Koppius, O. (2011). Predictive analytics in information systems research. MIS Quarterly, 35(3):553–572.
Steinbeck, W. (1982). Struktur und Ähnlichkeit. In Methoden automatisierter Melodieanalyse. Bärenreiter.
Stenzel, U. Lima, M. and Downes, J. . (2012). Study on Digital Content Products in the EU, Framework contract: Evaluation impact assessment and related services; Lot 2: Consumer’s Policy. Technical report, EU, Brussels.
Tan, P. et al. (2007). Introduction to Data Mining. Pearson Education.
Tong, S. and Koller, D. (2002). Support vector machine active learning with applications to text classification. The Journal of Machine Learning Research, 2:45–66.
Tseng, Y.-H. (1999). Content-based retrieval for music collections. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pages 176–182.
Tu, J. (1996). Advantages and disadvantages of using artificial neural networks versus logistic regression for predicting medical outcomes. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 49(11):1225–1231.
Typke, R., Wiering, F., and Veltkamp, R. (2005). A survey of music information retrieval systems. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR 2005), pages 153–160, London, UK.
Tzanetakis, G. and Cook, P. (2002). Musical genre classification of audio signals. IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, 10(5):293–302.
Tzanetakis, G., Ermolinskyi, A., and Cook, P. (2003). Pitch histograms in audio and symbolic music information retrieval. Journal of New Music Research, 32(2):143–152.
van Kranenburg, P. (2008). On measuring musical style—The case of some disputed organ fugues in the J. S. Bach (BWV) catalogue. Computing in Musicology, 15:120–137.
van Kranenburg, P. (2010). A computational approach to content-based retrieval of folk song melodies. PhD thesis, Utrecht University.
van Kranenburg, P. and Backer, E. (2004). Musical style recognition—A quantitative approach. In Proceedings of the Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology (CIM04), pages 106–107, Graz, Austria.
van Kranenburg, P., Volk, A., and Wiering, F. (2013). A comparison between global and local features for computational classification of folk song melodies. Journal of New Music Research, 42(1):1–18.
Vapnik, V. (1995). The Nature of Statistical Learning Theory. Springer.
Volk, A. and van Kranenburg, P. (2012). Melodic similarity among folk songs: An annotation study on similarity-based categorization in music. Musicae Scientiae, 16(3):317–339.
Weihs, C., Ligges, U., Mörchen, F., and Müllensiefen, D. (2007). Classification in music research. Advances in Data Analysis and Classification, 1(3):255–291.
Weka (2013). Weka documentation, class GridSearch. Last accessed: October 2014.
Whitman, B., Flake, G., and Lawrence, S. (2001). Artist detection in music with Minnowmatch. In Neural Networks for Signal Processing XI, 2001. Proceedings of the 2001 IEEE Signal Processing Society Workshop, pages 559–568. IEEE.
Whitman, B. and Smaragdis, P. (2002). Combining musical and cultural features for intelligent style detection. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Symposium on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR 2002), pages 47–52, Paris, France.
Witten, I. and Frank, E. (2005). Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques. Morgan Kaufmann.
Wold, E., Blum, T., Keislar, D., and Wheaten, J. (1996). Content-based classification, search, and retrieval of audio. MultiMedia, IEEE, 3(3):27–36.
Wołkowicz, J., Kulka, Z., and Keselj, V. (2007). N-gram-based approach to composer recognition. Master’s thesis, Warsaw University of Technology.
Wu, X., Kumar, V., Ross Quinlan, J., Ghosh, J., Yang, Q., Motoda, H., McLachlan, G., Ng, A., Liu, B., Yu, P., et al. (2008). Top 10 algorithms in data mining. Knowledge and Information Systems, 14(1):1–37.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Herremans, D., Martens, D., Sörensen, K. (2016). Composer Classification Models for Music-Theory Building. In: Meredith, D. (eds) Computational Music Analysis. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25931-4_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25931-4_14
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-25929-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-25931-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)