Title
From Context to Concept: Exploring Semantic Relationships in Music with Word2Vec.
Abstract
We explore the potential of a popular distributional semantics vector space model, word2vec, for capturing meaningful relationships in ecological (complex polyphonic) music. More precisely, the skip-gram version of word2vec is used to model slices of music from a large corpus spanning eight musical genres. In this newly learned vector space, a metric based on cosine distance is able to distinguish between functional chord relationships, as well as harmonic associations in the music. Evidence, based on cosine distance between chord-pair vectors, suggests that an implicit circle-of-fifths exists in the vector space. In addition, a comparison between pieces in different keys reveals that key relationships are represented in word2vec space. These results suggest that the newly learned embedded vector representation does in fact capture tonal and harmonic characteristics of music, without receiving explicit information about the musical content of the constituent slices. In order to investigate whether proximity in the discovered space of embeddings is indicative of ‘semantically-related’ slices, we explore a music generation task, by automatically replacing existing slices from a given piece of music with new slices. We propose an algorithm to find substitute slices based on spatial proximity and the pitch class distribution inferred in the chosen subspace. The results indicate that the size of the subspace used has a significant effect on whether slices belonging to the same key are selected. In sum, the proposed word2vec model is able to learn music-vector embeddings that capture meaningful tonal and harmonic relationships in music, thereby providing a useful tool for exploring musical properties and comparisons across pieces, as a potential input representation for deep learning models, and as a music generation device.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1007/s00521-018-3923-1
Neural Computing and Applications
Keywords
Field
DocType
Word2vec, Music, Semantic vector space model
Subspace topology,Distributional semantics,Artificial intelligence,Natural language processing,Vector space model,Polyphony,Deep learning,Word2vec,Chord (music),Pitch class,Machine learning,Mathematics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
abs/1811.12408
4
Neural Computing and Applications, Springer. 2019
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
3
0.46
25
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ching-Hua Chuan16813.89
Kat Agres2206.79
Dorien Herremans35416.22