HMM analysis of musical structure: Identification of latent variables through topology-sensitive model selection

Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) have been successfully employed in the exploration and modeling of musical structure, with applications in Music Information Retrieval. This paper focuses on an aspect of HMM training that remains relatively unexplored in musical applications, namely the determination of HMM topology. We demonstrate that this complex problem can be effectively addressed through search over model topology space, conducted by HMM state merging and/or splitting. Once successfully identified, the HMM topology that is optimal with respect to a given data set can help identify hidden (latent) variables that are important in shaping the data set's visible structure. These variables are identified by suitable interpretation of the HMM states for the selected topology. As an illustration, we present two case studies that successfully tackle two classic problems in music computation, namely (i) algorithmic statistical segmentation and (ii) meter induction from a sequence of durational patterns.