A Generative Model for Rhythms

Abstract

Modeling music involves capturing long-term dependencies in time series, which has proved very difficult to achieve with traditional statistical methods. The same problem occurs when only considering rhythms. In this paper, we introduce a generative model for rhythms based on the distributions of distances between subsequences. A specific implementation of the model when considering Hamming distances over a simple rhythm representation is described. The proposed model consistently outperforms a standard Hidden Markov Model in terms of conditional prediction accuracy on two different music databases.

Citation: A Generative Model for Rhythms, Jean-Francois Paiement, Samy Bengio, Yves Grandvalet, Doug Eck, Neural Information Processing Systems, Workshop on Brain, Music and Cognition, 2008.

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