Song classifications for dancing

A fundamental problem in music is to classify songs according to their rhythm. A rhythm is represented by a sequence of Quick (Q) and Slow (S) symbols, which correspond to the (relative) duration of notes, such that S = QQ. In this paper we present a linear algorithm for locating the maximum-length substring of a music text t that can be covered by a given rhythm r. An efficient algorithm to solve this problem, can then be used to find which rhythm, from a given set of such rhythms, covers the largest part of the music sequence under question, and thus best describes that sequence. © 2006 Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic.