Musical Stylometry, Machine Learning, and Attribution Studies: A Semi-Supervised Approach to the Works of Josquin. Brinkman, A., Shanahan, D., & Sapp, C. S. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, pages 91–97, San Francisco, 2016.
Musical Stylometry, Machine Learning, and Attribution Studies: A Semi-Supervised Approach to the Works of Josquin [pdf]Paper  abstract   bibtex   
Compositional authorship is often assigned though factors external to the musical text, such as biographical records and surveys of source attributions; however, such methodologies often fall short and are potentially unreliable. On the other hand, determining compositional authorship through internal factors—through stylistic traits of composers derived from the music itself—is often fraught with errors and biases. One of the underlying assumptions in the field of stylometry is that, while it is difficult for humans to perform a truly unbiased analysis of authorial attribution, computational methods can provide clearer and more objective guidelines than would otherwise be apparent to readers or listeners, and thus might provide corroboration or clues for further investigation. This paper discusses machine-learning approaches for evaluating attribution for compositions by Josquin des Prez. We explore musical characteristics such as melodic sequences, counterpoint motion, rhythmic variability, and other entry measures to search for features inherent to a composer's works or style, and we hope that employing such an approach—one that explicitly states which factors led to the decision-making process—can serve to inform scholars looking at other works and composers.

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