Identification and Description of Outliers in the Densmore Collection of Native American Music

• Main Authors: Kerstin Neubarth, Darrell Conklin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2019-02-01
• Series: Applied Sciences
• Subjects: computational ethnomusicology; contrast mining; pattern discovery; outlier detection; anomaly detection; data mining; Native American music
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/9/3/552

This paper presents a method for outlier detection in structured music corpora. Given a music collection organised into groups of songs, the method discovers contrast patterns which are significantly infrequent in a group. Discovered patterns identify and describe outlier songs exhibiting unusual properties in the context of their group. Applied to the collection of Native American music collated by Frances Densmore (1867⁻1957) during fieldwork among several North American tribes, and employing Densmore’s music content descriptors, the proposed method successfully discovers a concise set of patterns and outliers, many of which correspond closely to observations about tribal repertoires and songs presented by Densmore.