Locating tune changes and providing a semantic labelling of sets of irish traditional tunes

An approach is presented which provides the tune change locations within a set of Irish Traditional tunes. Also provided are semantic labels for each part of each tune within the set. A set in Irish Traditional music is a number of individual tunes played segue. Each of the tunes in the set are made up of structural segments called parts. Musical variation is a prominent characteristic of this genre. However, a certain set of notes known as 'set accented tones' are considered impervious to musical variation. Chroma information is extracted at 'set accented tone' locations within the music. The resulting chroma vectors are grouped to represent the parts of the music. The parts are then compared with one another to form a part similarity matrix. Unit kernels which represent the possible structures of an Irish Traditional tune are matched with the part similarity matrix to determine the tune change locations and semantic part labels.