Investigation of perceptual music similarity focusing on each instrumental part

TL;DR

This study investigates how perceptual music similarity varies across different instrumental parts, revealing that rhythm and melody influence perception more than timbre, with implications for music retrieval systems.

Contribution

It provides a large-scale listening test analysis focusing on instrumental parts, highlighting the differential impact of musical features on perceptual similarity.

Findings

Perceptual similarity varies by instrumental part.

Rhythm and melody influence perception more than timbre.

Existing features mainly capture timbre-based similarity.

Abstract

This paper presents an investigation of perceptual similarity between music tracks focusing on each individual instrumental part based on a large-scale listening test towards developing an instrumental-part-based music retrieval. In the listening test, 586 subjects evaluate the perceptual similarity of the audio tracks through an ABX test. We use the music tracks and their stems in the test set of the slakh2100 dataset. The perceptual similarity is evaluated based on four perspectives: timbre, rhythm, melody, and overall. We have analyzed the results of the listening test and have found that 1) perceptual music similarity varies depending on which instrumental part is focused on within each track; 2) rhythm and melody tend to have a larger impact on the perceptual music similarity than timbre except for the melody of drums; and 3) the previously proposed music similarity features tend to capture the perceptual similarity on timbre mainly.