Towards modeling and decomposing loop-based electronic music

Electronic Music (EM) is a popular family of genres which has increasingly received attention as a research subject in the field of MIR. A fundamental structural unit in EM are loops-audio fragments whose length can span several seconds. The devices commonly used to produce EM, such as sequencers and digital audio workstations, impose a musical structure in which loops are repeatedly triggered and overlaid. This particular structure allows new perspectives on well-known MIR tasks. In this paper we first review a prototypical production technique for EM from which we derive a simplified model. We then use our model to illustrate approaches for the following task: given a set of loops that were used to produce a track, decompose the track by finding the points in time at which each loop was activated. To this end, we repurpose established MIR techniques such as fingerprinting and non-negative matrix factor deconvolution.