Modeling Texture in Music

Studying texture is a part of music analysis. The change of texture plays an important role in the cognition of musical structures. Texture is a feature commonly used to analyze musical audio data, but it is rarely taken into account in MIR studies on symbolic scores.

We propose to formalize the texture in classical Western instrumental music as melody and accompaniment layers, and provide an algorithm able to detect homorhythmic layers in polyphonic data where voices are not separated. We present an evaluation of these methods for parallel motions against a ground truth analysis of ten instrumental pieces, including the first movements of the six quatuors op. 33 by Haydn.

Dataset with reference analysis of the texture

We manually analyzed the texture on 10 first movements of string quartets. We segmented each piece into non-overlapping segments based only on texture information, using the formalism described in the paper. We choose to report the texture with a resolution of one measure: We consider only segments during at least one measure (or filling the most part of the measure), and round the boundaries of these segments to bar lines.

Download the dataset from https://www.algomus.fr/data.

References