Applying the Independent Component Analysis for the estimation of an upper bound of the expressiveness of basic audio features commonly used in algorithms for computing music similarity Research Proposal

Many different methods for automatic retrieval of music similarity have been proposed. There are a number of low-level descriptors that are widely used as a basis for comparison algorithms. Although the different authors usually have different sets of songs to evaluate the algorithms and there usually is no exhaustive user evaluation, which makes the comparison between the different algorithms difficult, it seems that the expressiveness of the algorithms is somehow limited. The question that arises is, if this upper bound exists, or if the set of basic descriptors are sufficient to describe music exhaustively for computing similarity between different pieces of music.