A Musical Pattern Discovery System Founded on a Modeling of Listening Strategies
Résumé
Music is a domain of expression that conveys a paramount degree of complexity. The musical surface, composed of a multitude of notes, results from the elaboration of numerous structures of different types and sizes. The composer constructs this structural complexity in a more or less explicit way. The listener, faced by such a complex phenomenon, is able to reconstruct only a limited part of it, mostly in a non-explicit way. One particular aim of music analysis is to objectify such complexity, thus offering to the listener a tool for enriching the appreciation of music (Lartillot and Saint- James, 2004). The trouble is, traditional musical analysis, although offering a valuable understanding of musical style, does not go into the deepest details of this complexity. Some approaches of 20th-century musicology, such as the thematic analysis by Rudolph Reti (1951), were aimed at a better awareness of complexity. However, their scope was still restricted to a particular aspect of musical structure. For instance, Reti’s approach was founded on the hypothesis that a musical work is built on a single motive. And even within such limited scope, the search cannot be undertaken exhaustively, owing to the unreachable combinatory structure of musical works. Even worse, the results of such analyses do not meet a consensus agreement (Cook 1987), which questions the relevance of the underlying methods.