Detection of Similar Melodies by Repurposing Algorithms for Sequence Alignment and String Searching

Abstract

Music plagiarism is an important concern for the music industry. Current methods of using experts to detect plagiarism are subjective and prone to error. This paper compares the performance of both string-searching algorithms and algorithms traditionally used in bioinformatics, and in particular, Knuth-Morris-Pratt (KMP) and Smith-Waterman, for the detection of melodic plagiarism. The input MIDI files are converted into an array after data processing and used as the basis for comparison.  Across most thresholds, melodic plagiarism detection using KMP exhibits greater recall than, similar precision to, and faster runtimes than Smith-Waterman. We conclude that exact string searching algorithms like KMP can be more effective than local sequence alignment methods like Smith-Waterman.