Automatically summarize musical audio using adaptive clustering

Automatic music summarization is very useful for music indexing, content-based music retrieval and on-line music distribution, but it is a challenge to extract automatically the most common and salient themes from unstructured raw music data. We propose an effective approach to summarize music content automatically. First, a number of features are extracted to characterize the music content. Based on the extracted features, an adaptive clustering algorithm is then applied to structure the music content. Finally, the music summary is created in terms of the clustering results and domain-related music knowledge. A user study is conducted to evaluate the quality of summarization. The experiments on different genres of music illustrate the results of summarization are significant and effective to actual expectation.