A Graph Theoretic Approach to Melodic Similarity

Common music information retrieval methods are based upon editing distances, reductionism or functional analysis tecniques. We adopt an approach which looks into a thematic fragment (TF) globally. This leads to associate a musical graph to each TF which preserves its more abstract content. Then, necessary conditions for graph inclusion are introduced and we give a similarity function between graphs which allows to assign different weights to the elements belonging to different graph powers. The advantage is that graphs catch more musical transformations than other methods, like permutations of subfragments.