Towards Support for Understanding Classical Music: Alignment of Content Descriptions on the Web

Supporting the understanding of classical music is an important topic that involves various research fields such as text analysis and acoustics analysis. Content descriptions are explanations of classical music compositions that help a person to understand technical aspects of the music. Recently, Kuribayashi et al. proposed a method for obtaining content descriptions from the web. However, the content descriptions on a single page frequently explain a specific part of a composition only. Therefore, a person who wants to fully understand the composition suffers from a time-consuming task, which seems almost impossible for a novice of classical music. To integrate the content descriptions obtained from multiple pages, we propose a method for aligning each pair of paragraphs of such descriptions. Using dynamic time warping-based method along with our new ideas, (a) a distribution-based distance measure named w2DD, and (b) the concept of passage expressions, it is possible to align content descriptions of classical music better than when using cutting-edge text analysis methods. Our method can be extended in future studies to create applications systems to integrate descriptions with musical scores and performances.