Towards Cross-Version Harmonic Analysis of Music

For a given piece of music, there often exist multiple versions belonging to the symbolic (e.g., MIDI representations), acoustic (audio recordings), or vi sual (sheet music) domain. Each type of information allows for applying specialized, domain-spe- ci fi c approaches to music analysis tasks. In this paper, we formulate the idea of a cross-version analysis for comparing and/or combining analysis results from different representations. As an example, we realize this idea in the context o f harmonic analysis to automati- cally evaluate MIDI-based chord l abeling procedures using anno- tations given for corresponding audio recordings. To this end, one needs reliable synchronization pr ocedures that automatically es- tablish the musical relationship between the multiple versions of a given piece. This becomes a hard problem when there are sig- ni fi cant local deviations in these versions. We introduce a novel late-fusion approach that combines d ifferent alignment procedures in order to identify reliable parts in synchronization results. Then, the cross-version comparison of th e various chord labeling results is performed only on the basis of the reliable parts. Finally, we show how inconsistencies in these resul ts across the different versions allow for a quantitative and qualitative evaluation, which not only indicates limitations of the empl oyed chord labeling strategies but also deepens the understanding of the underlying music material