Using Fisher Kernels and Hidden Markov Models for the Identification of Famous Composers from Their Sheet Music

Using Fisher Kernels and Hidden Markov Models for the Identification of

Famous Composers from their Sheet Music

David R. Hardoon

University of Southampton

ISIS Research Group

Building 1, Highfield

Southampton, SO17 1BJ

drh@ecs.soton.ac.uk

Craig Saunders

University of Southampton

ISIS Research Group

Building 1, Highfield

Southampton, SO17 1BJ

cjs@ecs.soton.ac.uk

ABSTRACT

We present a novel application of Fisher kernels to the

problem of identifying famous composers from their sheet

music. The characteristics of the composers writing style

are obtained from note changes on a basic beat level, combined with the notes hidden harmony. We are able to

extract this information by the application of a Hidden

Markov Model to learn the underlying probabilistic structure of the score. We are able to use the model to generate new sheet music based on a specific composer. Furthermore we do an identification comparison using Fisher

kernels and a Hidden Markov Model on limited data.

Keywords: Fisher Kernel, HMM, SVM, Composer

Identification.

1

Introduction

In the last several years music information retrieval,

generation and classification has become a major topic

of interest. The analysis of music has been addressed

using natural language modelling and statistical models

that have been mostly focused on digital audio resources.

Batlle and Cano (2000) have applied Hidden Markov

Models (HMM)(Rabiner, 1989) on audio fragments

for music segmentation and classification (Batlle et al.,

2004). While others have applied grammatical induction

to learn the genre and style of MIDI files. An interesting

review of music generation from statistical models is

given by Conklin (2003).

In previous work (Saunders et al., 2004) we have

presented a novel application of string kernels to the

problem of recognising famous pianists from their style

of playing. This was done using a measurement of the

changes in beat-level tempo and beat-level loudness

(Zanon...