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Posted by John on 3/12/2006, 8:16 pm, in reply to "Re: melody vs. harmony" If you quantify rhythmic activity, volume, and range you may be able to “guess” which line has the melody. Unfortunately though you could never attain 100% accuracy because you are working with something that is fairly abstract. I will elaborate more on quantifying rhythmic activity in a useful way: For the particular section of music Compare the average note durations for each instrument The average note duration on the first line is 1 and the average note duration of the second line is 4. In this case the line with the lowest average note duration would most likely be the melody. This is just an example of how you would go about quantifying a musical attribute and making a heuristic, hopefully it will give you a starting point.
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You will need to develop some heuristics to determine which line/instrument is most likely to have the melody.
For each line/instrument
Count the number of notes
Do a summation of all of the note durations
Determine the average note duration for the current line/instrument
For example if you have 2 lines and the first line has 8 notes each with a duration of 1, and the second line has 2 notes each with a duration 4: (think about it as 2 measures of 4/4 where part 1 has 8 quarters and part 2 has 2 whole notes)
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