Barwise Compression Schemes for Audio-Based Music Structure Analysis

Abstract: Music Structure Analysis (MSA) consists in segmenting a music piece in several distinct sections. We approach MSA within a compression framework, under the hypothesis that the structure is more easily revealed by a simplified representation of the original content of the song. More specifically, under the hypothesis that MSA is correlated with similarities occurring at the bar scale, this article introduces the use of linear and non-linear compression schemes on barwise audio signals. Compressed representations capture the most salient components of the different bars in the song and are then used to infer the song structure using a dynamic programming algorithm. This work explores both low-rank approximation models such as Principal Component Analysis or Nonnegative Matrix Factorization and "piece-specific" Auto-Encoding Neural Networks, with the objective to learn latent representations specific to a given song. Such approaches do not rely on supervision nor annotations, which are well-known to be tedious to collect and possibly ambiguous in MSA description. In our experiments, several unsupervised compression schemes achieve a level of performance comparable to that of state-of-the-art supervised methods (for 3s tolerance) on the RWC-Pop dataset, showcasing the importance of the barwise compression processing for MSA.