A Distance Model for Rhythms Jean-Fran¸cois Paiement
[email protected] Yves Grandvalet
[email protected] IDIAP Research Institute, Case Postale 592, CH-1920 Martigny, Switzerland Samy Bengio
[email protected] Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy, Mountain View, CA 94043, USA Douglas Eck
[email protected] Universit´ede Montr´eal, Department of Computer Science, CP 6128, Succ. Centre-Ville, Montr´eal, Qu´ebec H3C 3J7, Canada Abstract nested periodic components. Such a hierarchy is im- Modeling long-term dependencies in time se- plied in western music notation, where different levels ries has proved very difficult to achieve with are indicated by kinds of notes (whole notes, half notes, traditional machine learning methods. This quarter notes, etc.) and where bars establish measures problem occurs when considering music data. of an equal number of beats. Meter and rhythm pro- In this paper, we introduce a model for vide a framework for developing musical melody. For rhythms based on the distributions of dis- example, a long melody is often composed by repeating tances between subsequences. A specific im- with variation shorter sequences that fit into the met- plementation of the model when consider- rical hierarchy (e.g. sequences of 4, 8 or 16 measures). ing Hamming distances over a simple rhythm It is well know in music theory that distance patterns representation is described. The proposed are more important than the actual choice of notes in model consistently outperforms a standard order to create coherent music (Handel, 1993). In this Hidden Markov Model in terms of conditional work, distance patterns refer to distances between sub- prediction accuracy on two different music sequences of equal length in particular positions.