Analyzing Measure Annotations for Western Classical Music Recordings

This paper approaches the problem of annotating measure positions in Western classical music recordings. Such annotations can be useful for navigation, segmentation, and cross-version analysis of music in different types of representations. In a case study based on Wagner’s opera “Die Walküre”, we analyze two types of annotations. First, we report on an experiment where several human listeners generated annotations in a manual fashion. Second, we examine computer-generated annotations which were obtained by using score-to-audio alignment techniques. As one main contribution of this paper, we discuss the inconsistencies of the different annotations and study possible musical reasons for deviations. As another contribution, we propose a kernel-based method for automatically estimating confidences of the computed annotations which may serve as a first step towards improving the quality of this automatic method.