Calculating Similarity of Folk Song Variants with Melody-based Features

As folk songs live largely through oral transmission, there usually is no standard form of a song each performance of a folk song may be unique. Different interpretations of the same song are called song variants, all variants of a song belong to the same variant type. In the paper, we explore how various melody-based features relate to folk song variants. Specifically, we explore whether we can derive a melodic similarity measure that would correlate to variant types in the sense that it would measure songs belonging to the same variant type as more similar, in contrast to songs from different variant types. The measure would be useful for folk song retrieval based on variant types, classification of unknown tunes, as well as a measure of similarity between variant types. We experimented with a number of melodic features calculated from symbolic representations of folk song melodies and combined them into a melodybased folk song similarity measure. We evaluated the measure on the task of classifying an unknown melody into a set of existing variant types. We show that the proposed measure gives the correct variant type in the top 10 list for 68% of queries in our data set.