Querying improvised music: Do you sound like yourself?

Improvisers are often keen to assess how their performance practice stands up to an ideal: whether that ideal is of technical accuracy or instant composition of material meeting complex harmonic constraints at speed. This paper reports on the development of an interface for querying and navigating a collection of recorded material for the purpose of presenting information on musical similarity, and the application of this interface to the investigation of a set of recordings by jazz performers. We investigate the retrieval performance of our tool, and in analysing the ‘hits’ and particularly the ‘misses’, provide information suggesting a change in one of the authors’ improvisation style.