Enhanced Hierarchical Music Structure Annotations via Feature Level Similarity Fusion

We describe a novel pipeline to automatically discover hierarchies of repeated sections in musical audio. The proposed method uses similarity network fusion (SNF) to combine different frame-level features into clean affinity matrices, which are then used as input to spectral clustering. While prior spectral clustering approaches to music structure analysis have pre-processed affinity matrices with heuristics specifically designed for this task, we show that the SNF approach directly yields segmentations which agree better with human annotators, as measured by the "L-measure" metric for hierarchical annotations. Furthermore, the SNF approach immediately supports arbitrarily many input features, allowing us to simultaneously discover structure encoded in timbral, harmonic, and rhythmic representations without any changes to the base algorithm.