MUSIC ANALYSIS AS A SMALLEST GRAMMAR PROBLEM

In this paper we present a novel approach to music analysis, in which a grammar is automatically generated explain-ing a musical work’s structure. The proposed method is predicated on the hypothesis that the shortest possible gram-mar provides a model of the musical structure which is a good representation of the composer’s intent. The effec-tiveness of our approach is demonstrated by comparison of the results with previously-published expert analysis; our automated approach produces results comparable to human annotation. We also illustrate the power of our approach by showing that it is able to locate errors in scores, such as introduced by OMR or human transcription. Further, our ap-proach provides a novel mechanism for intuitive high-level editing and creative transformation of music. A wide range of other possible applications exists, including automatic summarization and simplification; estimation of musical complexity and similarity, and plagiarism detection. 1