AGREEMENT AMONG HUMAN AND AUTOMATED ESTIMATES OF SIMILARITY IN A GLOBAL MUSIC SAMPLEResearch Agreement • May 24th, 2022
Contract Type FiledMay 24th, 2022While music information retrieval (MIR) has made substantial progress in automatic analysis of audio similarity for Western music, it remains unclear whether these algorithms can be mean- ingfully applied to cross-cultural analyses of more diverse mu- sics. Here we collect perceptual ratings from 62 Japanese partici- pants using a global sample of 30 traditional songs, and compare these ratings against both pre-existing expert annotations and au- dio similarity algorithms. We find that different methods of per- ceptual ratings all produced similar, moderate levels of inter-rater agreement comparable to previous studies, but that agreement be- tween human and automated methods is always low regardless of the specific methods used to calculate musical similarity. Our findings suggest that the MIR methods tested are unable to mea- sure cross-cultural music similarity in perceptually meaningful ways.