Musical style identification using self-organising maps

In this paper the capability of using self-organising neural maps (SOM) as music style classifiers from symbolic specifications of musical fragments is studied. From MIDI file sources, the monophonic melody track is extracted and cut into fragments of equal length. From these sequences, melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic numerical descriptors are computed and presented to the SOM. Their performance is analysed in terms of separability in different music classes from the activations of the map, obtaining different degrees of success for classical and jazz music. This scheme has a number of applications like indexing and selecting musical databases or the evaluation of style-specific automatic composition systems.