Association Mining of Folk Music Genres and Toponyms

This paper demonstrates how association rule mining can be applied to discover relations between two ontologies of folk music: a genre and a region ontology. Genre– region associations have been widely studied in folk music research but have been neglected in music information retrieval. We present a method of association rule min- ing with constraints consisting of rule templates and rule evaluation measures to identify different, musicologically motivated, categories of genre–region associations. The method is applied to a corpus of 1902 Basque folk tunes, and several interesting rules and rule sets are discovered