Kerstin Neubarth

Contrast Pattern Mining in Folk Music Analysis

Comparing groups in data is a common theme in corpus-level music analysis and in exploratory data mining. Contrast patterns describe significant differences between groups. This chapter introduces the task and techniques of contrast pattern mining and reviews work in quantitative and computational folk music analysis as mining for contrast patterns. Three case studies are presented in detail to illustrate different pattern representations, datasets and groupings of folk music corpora, and pattern mining methods: subgroup discovery of global feature patterns in European folk music, emerging pattern mining of sequential patterns in Cretan folk tunes, and association rule mining of positive and negative patterns in Basque folk music. While this chapter focuses on examples in folk music analysis, the concept of contrast patterns offers opportunities for computational music analysis more generally, which can draw on both musicological traditions of quantitative comparative analysis and research in contrast data mining.

Supervised descriptive pattern discovery in Native American music

The discovery of recurrent patterns in groups of songs is an important first step in computational corpus analysis. In this paper, computational techniques of supervised descriptive pattern discovery are applied to model and extend ethnomusicological analyses of Native American music. Using a corpus of over 2000 songs collected and transcribed by anthropologist Frances Densmore and building on Densmore’s own music content features, the analysis identifies musical differences between indigenous groups and between musical style areas of the North American continent. Contrast set mining is adapted to discover global-feature patterns which are distinctive for a group, statistically significant and maximally general. The work extends previous descriptive studies in computational folk music analysis by considering feature-set patterns of variable size. Discovered patterns confirm, differentiate and complement ethnomusicological observations on Native American music.