2012 Presentations (Communicative Events)

Large-Scale Cover Song Recognition Using the 2D Fourier Transform Magnitude

Ellis, Daniel P. W.; Thierry, Bertin-Mahieux

Large-scale cover song recognition involves calculating item-to-item similarities that can accommodate differences in timing and tempo, rendering simple Euclidean measures unsuitable. Expensive solutions such as dynamic time warping do not scale to million of instances, making them inappropriate for commercial-scale applications. In this work, we transform a beat-synchronous chroma matrix with a 2D Fourier transform and show that the resulting representation has properties that fit the cover song recognition task. We can also apply PCA to efficiently scale comparisons. We report the best results to date on the largest available dataset of around 18,000 cover songs amid one million tracks, giving a mean average precision of 3.0%.