A geometric approach to pattern matching in polyphonic music

I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public. ii The music pattern matching problem involves finding matches of a small fragment of music called the “pattern ” into a larger body of music called the “score”. We represent music as a series of horizontal line segments in the plane, and reformulate the problem as finding the best translation of a small set of horizontal line segments into a larger set of horizontal line segments. We present an efficient algorithm that can handle general weight models that measure the musical quality of a match of the pattern into the score, allowing for approximate pattern matching. We give an algorithm with running time O(nm(d + log m)), where n is the size of the score, m is the size of the pattern, and d is the size of the discrete set of musical pitches used. Our algorithm compares favourably to previous approaches to the music patter