A smallest grammar approach to the symbolic analysis of music

In this chapter we discuss symbolic analysis of music using grammars, and present a novel approach to such an analysis, in which a compressive grammar is automatically generated explaining a musical work’s structure. The proposed method is predicated on the hypothesis that the shortest possible grammar provides a model of the musical structure which is a good representation of the composer’s intent. The effectiveness 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 those introduced by OMR or human transcription. Further, our approach 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