Symbolic Segmentation: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Melodic Phrases

Gestalt-based segmentation models constitute the current state of the art in automatic segmentation of melodies. These models commonly assume that segment boundary perception is mainly triggered by local discontinuities, i.e. by abrupt changes in pitch and/or duration of neighbouring note events. This paper presents a statistical study of melodic phrase segments to test this assumption. The study focuses on the analysis of pitch and duration in the neighbourhood of annotated phrase boundaries. Our analysis reveals stability in duration information (specifically inter-onset-interval sizes), and variability in pitch information (specifically chromatic interval sizes). We conclude that pitch interval size, can not be addressed as a local, idiom independent cue to boundary perception.