A text categorization approach for music style recognition

The automatic classification of music files into styles is one challenging problem in music information retrieval and for music style perception understanding. It has a number of applications, like the indexation and exploration of musical databases. Some techniques used in text classification can be applied to this problem. The key point is to establish a music equivalent to the words in texts. A number of works use the combination of intervals and duration ratios for music description. In this paper, different statistical text recognition algorithms are applied to style recognition using this kind of melody representation, exploring their performance for different word sizes and statistical models.