Music Form Analysis: A Case Study of the Theme and Variations Form

The theme and variation music form is a hierarchical structure in music. It has a theme segment at the beginning, followed by a series of variation segments imitating the theme segment. Hence, the primary features of the theme and variation form are repetition and variation at different levels. However, due to the lack of available datasets, the theme and variation form analysis method has not been explored much. Therefore, in this work, we curate and contribute a dataset named Performance of Theme and Variation Form (PTV) and propose a theme and variation form segmentation framework to analyze the theme and variation form. Experiment results show that our method achieves an F1 score of 92.8% on our dataset with some constraints. In addition, we conduct analysis to support and encourage future studies of the theme and variation form.