Multi-Probe Histograms: A Mid-Level Harmonic Feature for Music Structure Segmentation
The use of mid-level audio features has recently shown promising perspectives for music content description tasks. In this paper we investigate the use of a mid-level harmony-related descriptor for the task of music structure analysis. The idea behind the descriptor is to concatenate the chroma sequence of a musical segment in a Multi Probe Histogram (MPH). Probing local pitch intervals within the chroma sequence, we show that such an abstraction of the audio signal is a good descriptor of the tonal hierarchy that is consequent to a given key or melodic line. It is thus a powerful feature for describing harmonic and melodic progressions within a music piece. After introducing the histograms’ computation and enlightening their relation to harmony, we use such a description for the task of music structure segmentation and provide preliminary results that show very encouraging perspectives.