MIREX 2011 Symbolic Melodic Similarity: Sequence Alignment with Geometric Representations

This short paper describes our three submissions to the MIREX 2011 Symbolic Melodic Similarity task. All three submissions rely on a geometric model that represents melodies as spline curves in the pitch-time plane. The similarity between two melodies is then computed with a sequence alignment algorithm between sequences of spline spans: the more similar the shape of the curves, the more similar the melodies they represent. As in MIREX 2010, our systems ranked first for all effectiveness measures used.