MATCH: A Music Alignment Tool Chest

We present MATCH, a toolkit for aligning audio recordings of different renditions of the same piece of music, based on an efficient implementation of a dynamic time warping algorithm. A forward path estimation algorithm constrains the alignment path so that dynamic time warping can be performed with time and space costs that are linear in the size of the audio files. Frames of audio are represented by a positive spectral difference vector, which emphasises note onsets in the alignment process. MATCH was tested on several hundred test cases and had a median error of 20 ms, with less than 1% of test cases failing to align at all. The software is useful for content-based indexing of audio files and for the study of performance interpretation; it can also be used in real-time for tracking live performances. Another possible application is in an intelligent audio recording and editing system for aligning splice points. The toolkit also provides functions for displaying the cost matrix, ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ISMIR
• Authors: Simon Dixon, Gerhard Widmer
• Keywords: Audio Recording, Audio files, Dynamic Time Warping, Information Retrieval, ISMIR 2005