A hubness-score based normalization of the pairwise similarity is proposed for the sequence-alignment based cover song retrieval. The hubness, which is the tendency of some data points in high-dimensional data sets to link more frequently to other points than the rest of the points from the set, is widely-known to deteriorate the information retrieval accuracy. This paper tries to relieve the performance degradation due to the hubness by normalizing the pairwise similarity with a hubness score. Experiments on two cover song datasets confirm that the proposed similarity normalization improves the cover song retrieval accuracy.

Music-similarity computation is an essential building block for the browsing, retrieval, and indexing of digital music archives. This paper proposes a music similarity function based on the centroid model, which divides the feature space into non-overlapping clusters for the efficient computation of the timber distance of two songs. We place particular emphasis on the centroid deviation as a feature for music-similarity computation. Experiments show that the centroid-model representation of the auditory features is promising for music-similarity computation.