measuring musical rhythm similarity: transformation versus feature-based methods

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Post on 31-Dec-2015

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Aims. By combining phylogenetic tools from cultural evolutionary biology with the cognitiveand computational study of measures of rhythm similarity from musicology and music theory,this project aims to create a synergistic bridge between these two domains of knowledge.Main contribution. A feature-based approach to rhythm similarity is compared to a frequentlyused transformation method, using a family of rhythms of equal length. Distance matricescalculated from the rhythms are compared with ‘dissimilarity’ matrices obtained from humanjudgments using Mantel tests. Two different phylogenetic analysis techniques are alsocompared: a distance based method and a Bayesian approach. The results provide evidencefrom the music domain that supports the hypothesis that transformation methods are superior tofeature-based methods for modeling more general human similarity judgments.Implications. Our results highlight the difficulty of modeling rhythm similarity by means ofpurely structural features collected from musicology and music theory, and imply that moreattention should be devoted to the study of transformation methods. The methods exploredhere, standard in evolutionary biology and anthropology, provide novel tools for musicologyand music theory that complement traditional historical and ethnographic accounts.