The task of music structure analysis refers to automatically identifying the location and the nature of musical sections within a song. In the supervised scenario, structural annotations generally result from exhaustive data collection processes, which represents one of the main challenges of this task. Moreover, both the subjectivity of music structure and the hierarchical characteristics it exhibits make the obtained structural annotations not fully reliable, in the sense that they do not convey a “universal ground-truth” unlike other tasks in music information retrieval. On the other hand, the quickly growing quantity of available music data has enabled weakly supervised and self-supervised approaches to achieve impressive results on a wide range of music-related problems. In this work, a self-supervised learning method is proposed to learn robust multi-level music representations prior to structural segmentation using contrastive learning. To this end, sets of frames sampled at different levels of detail are used to train a deep neural network in a disentangled manner. The proposed method is evaluated on both flat and multi-level segmentation. We show that each distinct sub-region of the output embeddings can efficiently account for structural similarity at their own targeted level of detail, which ultimately improves performance of downstream flat and multi-level segmentation. Finally, complementary experiments are carried out to study how the obtained representations can be further adapted to specific datasets using a supervised fine-tuning objective in order to facilitate structure retrieval in domains where human annotations remain scarce.

Jazz is a musical tradition that is just over 100 years old; unlike in other Western musical traditions, improvisation plays a central role in jazz. Modelling the domain of jazz poses some ontological challenges due to specificities in musical content and performance practice, such as band lineup fluidity and importance of short melodic patterns for improvisation. This paper presents the Jazz Ontology – a semantic model that addresses these challenges. Additionally, the model also describes workflows for annotating recordings with melody transcriptions and for pattern search. The Jazz Ontology incorporates existing standards and ontologies such as FRBR and the Music Ontology. The ontology has been assessed by examining how well it supports describing and merging existing datasets and whether it facilitates novel discoveries in a music browsing application. The utility of the ontology is also demonstrated in a novel framework for managing jazz related music information. This involves the population of the Jazz Ontology with the metadata from large scale audio and bibliographic corpora (the Jazz Encyclopedia and the Jazz Discography). The resulting RDF datasets were merged and linked to existing Linked Open Data resources. These datasets are publicly available and are driving an online application that is being used by jazz researchers and music lovers for the systematic study of jazz.

In recent years the task of downbeat tracking has received increasing attention and the state of the art has been improved with the introduction of deep learning methods. Among proposed solutions, existing systems exploit short-term musical rules as part of their language modelling. In this work we show in an oracle scenario how including longer-term musical rules, in particular music structure, can enhance downbeat estimation. We introduce a skip-chain conditional random field language model for downbeat tracking designed to include section information in an unified and flexible framework. We combine this model with a state-of-the-art convolutional-recurrent network and we contrast the system’s performance to the commonly used Bar Pointer model. Our experiments on the popular Beatles dataset show that incorporating structure information in the language model leads to more consistent and more robust downbeat estimations.