Visualizing Musical Structure and Rhythm via Self-Similarity

J. Foote and M. Cooper. In Proceedings International Conference on Computer Music, Habana, Cuba, September 2001

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach to visualizing the time structure of musical waveforms. The acoustic similarity between any two instants of an audio recording is displayed in a static 2D representation, which makes structural and rhythmic characteristics visible. Unlike practically all prior work, this method characterizes self-similarity rather than specific audio attributes such as pitch or spectral features. Examples are presented for classical and popular music.


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