Cover song identification

Cover Song Identification is the task of identifying an alternative version of a previous musical piece, even though it may differ substantially in timbre, tempo, structure, and even fundamental aspects relating to the harmony and melody of the song. The term “cover” is so wide that it ranges from acoustic renditions of a previous song, to Jimi Hendrix’ famous (and radical) reinterpretation of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower”, to Rage Against the Machine essentially rewriting Bob Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm”. Beyond its value for computational musicology and for enhancing music recommendation, Cover Song Identification is of interest because of its potential for benchmarking other music similarity and retrieval algorithms. Chord analysis, melody extraction and music similarity are all strongly connected to Cover Song Identification - another field of music analysis where AI has been applied.

Source: Artificial Musical Intelligence: A Survey