Aitor Arronte-Alvarez

Aitor Arronte-Alvarez, Francisco Gomez-Martin

In this paper we present an attentional neural network for folk song classification. We introduce the concept of musical motif embedding, and show how using melodic local context we are able to model monophonic folk song motifs using the skipgram version of the word2vec algorithm. We use the motif embeddings to represent folk songs from Germany, China, and Sweden, and classify them using an attentional neural network that is able to discern relevant motifs in a song. The results show how the network obtains state of the art accuracy in a completely unsupervised manner, and how motif embeddings produce high quality motif representations from folk songs. We conjecture on the advantages of this type of representation in large symbolic music corpora, and how it can be helpful in the musicological analysis of folk song collections from different cultures and geographical areas.

Aitor Arronte-Alvarez, Francisco Gómez-Martin

This article presents a distributed vector representation model for learning folksong motifs. A skip-gram version of word2vec with negative sampling is used to represent high quality embeddings. Motifs from the Essen Folksong collection are compared based on their cosine similarity. A new evaluation method for testing the quality of the embeddings based on a melodic similarity task is presented to show how the vector space can represent complex contextual features, and how it can be utilized for the study of folksong variation.