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

Abstract

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.