A Comparison of Rhythmic Similarity Measures

Measuring the similarity between rhythms is a fundamental problem in computational music theory, with many applications such as music information retrieval and copyright infringement resolution. A common way to represent a rhythm is as a binary sequence where a zero denotes a rest (silence) and a one represents a beat or note onset. This paper compares various measures of rhythm similarity including the Hamming distance, the Euclidean interval-vector distance, the interval-difference distance measure of Coyle and Shmulevich, the swap distance, and the chronotonic distance measures of Gustafson and Hofmann-Engl. Traditionally, rhythmic similarity measures are compared according to how well rhythms may be recognized with them, how efficiently they can be retrieved from a data base, or how well they model human perception and cognition of rhythms. In contrast, here similarity measures are compared on the basis of how much insight they provide about the structural inter-relationships tha...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ISMIR
• Authors: Godfried T. Toussaint
• Keywords: Chronotonic Distance Measures, ISMIR 2004, Rhythms, Similarity Measures