Music Information Retrieval Techniques for Determining the Place of Origin of a Music Interpretation

Abstract

Determining the place of origin of the musical compositions is a modern area of research in the field of music information retrieval (MIR). The musical interpretation of one piece carries a variety of author's intentions that influence the musical character of the resulting composition. These aspects may include rhythm, dynamics, timbre, or tonality. This paper introduces a novel methodology for determining the place of origin of a music interpretation based on advanced signal processing and machine learning techniques. For this purpose, we collected a database of 35 different interpretations of Leos Janacek's String Quartet No.1, “Kreutzer Sonat”: IV. Con Moto-Adagio. Employing random forests classifier, we achieved classification accuracy over 97 % using features derived from Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients. This paper proves it is possible to use MRI for determining the origin of a music interpretation with very high accuracy.