Melodic String Matching via Interval Consolidation and Fragmentation

In this paper, we address the problem of melodic string matching that enables identification of varied (ornamented) instances of a given melodic pattern. To this aim, a new set of edit distance operations adequate for pitch interval strings is introduced. Insertion, deletion and replacement operations are abolished as irrelevant. Consolidation and fragmentation are retained, but adapted to the pitch interval domain, i.e., two or more intervals of one string may be matched to an interval from a second string through consolidation or fragmentation. The melodic interval string matching problem consists of finding all occurrences of a given pattern in a melodic sequence that takes into account exact matches, consolidations and fragmentations of intervals in both the sequence and the pattern. We show some properties of the problem and an algorithm that solves this problem is proposed.