Methods for Comparing and Classifying Tunes

Declaration I hereby declare that this project is entirely my own work and that it has not been submitted as an exercise for a degree at this or any other university I agree that the Library and other agents of the College may lend or copy this thesis upon request. Abstract This project is about classifying (traditional Irish) melodies and comparing them to other melodies so that some indication of similarity between songs can be found. The method used provides a system that is independent of key, tempo-independent, allows for minor variations or mistakes, and can work for different instruments. The current applications for song recognition are reviewed and analysed. Methods of implementing this project are discussed and papers on pitch detection, song recognition and transcription are described. A program was developed to transcribe songs to musical notation and this was tested with traditional Irish songs. The program's performance was analysed, and a method was outlined for finding similarities between songs. This could not be implemented however due to inaccuracies in the transcription, but methods for further developing the program are described and future applications are described.