Formal Modeling of Structural Repetition using Tree Compression
Zeng Ren (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)*, Yannis Rammos (EPFL), Martin A Rohrmeier (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)
Keywords: Computational musicology -> mathematical music theory; Knowledge-driven approaches to MIR -> computational music theory and musicology; Knowledge-driven approaches to MIR -> representations of music; Musical features and properties -> harmony, chords and tonality; Musical features and properties -> structure, segmentation, and form, Computational musicology
Repetition is central to musical structure as it gives rise both to piece-wise and stylistic coherence. Identifying repetitions in music is computationally not trivial, especially when they are varied or deeply hidden within tree-like structures. Rather than focusing on repetitions of musical events, we propose to pursue repeated structural relations between events. More specifically, given a context-free grammar that describes a tonal structure, we aim to computationally identify such relational repetitions within the derivation tree of the grammar. To this end, we first introduce the template, a grammar-generic structure for generating trees that contain structural repetitions. We then approach the discovery of structural repetitions as a search for optimally compressible templates that describe a corpus of pieces in the form of production-rule-labeled trees. To make it tractable, we develop a heuristic, inspired by tree compression algorithms, to approximate the optimally compressible templates of the corpus. After implementing the algorithm in Haskell, we apply it to a corpus of jazz harmony trees, where we assess its performance based on the compressibility of the resulting templates and the music-theoretical relevance of the identified repetitions.
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