Computing Evolutionary Chains in Musical Sequences

Musical patterns that recur in approximate, rather than identical, form within the body of a musical work are considered to be of considerable importance in music analysis. Here we consider the “evolutionary chain problem”: this is the problem of computing a chain of all “motif” recurrences, each of which is a transformation of (“similar” to) the original motif, but each of which may be progressively further from the original. Here we consider several variants of the evolutionary chain problem and we present efficient algorithms and implementations for solving them.