# Measure of similarity between two distributions - with variable starting point (wrap-around)

I would like to compute the (dis)similarity between two distributions. The first represents tones sung by an experimental subject during a recording. There are different numbers of tones, each with different durations. This histogram shows how much time was spent at each pitch (in Hz) by one subject:

My second distribution always represents the theoretical profile of a major key, as described in the empirical pitch perception literature:

The two distributions are comparable/equivalent if one merely takes the log of the 1st distribution (to transform frequency into equally-spaced pitch as in the 2nd); and if one considers "time spent at each pitch" (y axis in the 1st distribution) to be equivalent to "saliency" or "fit" (y axis in the 2nd).

From browsing past CV questions, I thought I'd try the Kolmogorov-Smirnov distance, the Bhattacharyya distance (second implementation here), and the Kullback–Leibler divergence. I believe all 3 measures can deal with unequal sample sizes, however the Matlab/R packages I found to implement those seem to require different inputs from what I was expecting to be asked, namely two vectors of possibly different length.

Additionally, I'd need this measure of similarity to "wrap around" or "slide", in the sense of considering any of the points in the first histogram (along the x axis) as the "starting point", by rotation, just as the note C is always the starting point in the C-major key profile given in figure 2. This is probably not critical, as I can loop this manually (i.e. compare against all 12 keys for the 2nd distribution).

• What are you going to do with this distance? Maybe you want to use it to identify who sings most off-key, or who sings most outside of a given range. The distance between these two distributions doesn't look like the most natural thing to measure. Oct 26, 2021 at 3:54
• Good question - I actually want to see how much each pitch distribution (coming from person's singing) resembles the most a diatonic scale, the blueprints for which are key profiles such as the one in the 2nd plot. Oct 26, 2021 at 8:49
• i dont see why K-S stat wouldnt work here, you seem to have a simple coding problem to convert/interpolate the vectors into a vector of common length Nov 1, 2021 at 15:10
• I actually found no Matlab implementation of the K-S distance (the link I posted just calls upon a ksm_avg.m function that I could not find). Also, the inputs need not to be of the same size but rather for the first distribution (empirical) to be reduced to a single octave, so that it becomes comparable with the second distribution (theoretical). Nov 2, 2021 at 11:13
• And also, do you actually find the K-S the most suitable of the 3 metrics? Nov 2, 2021 at 11:37

This problem is more challenging than it might look, for many reasons--some of which will become apparent in discussing one set of solutions. I was moved to post this discussion because of the emergence of several surprising results, illustrated at the end.

In the interests of space, I will focus on presenting one solution and describing its important statistical properties. I offer it partly as an object lesson in the pitfalls lurking for the unwary (who might otherwise be tempted to apply some "standard" statistical procedure to this problem). The approach it describes does look promising as a way of addressing the problem if you are suitably careful.

Readers in a hurry might want to skip to the illustrated example that makes up the second half of this post.

The question essentially asks for a way to (1) match the observations to a "salience" distribution and (2) assess how well those observations fit the distribution. The matching must account for the possibility that the origin of the observations (its "tonic," or basic tone) is unknown. The example in the question also makes it clear the observations are not discrete: singing a given tone of a scale can be expected to result in various frequencies. (This can result from poor singing; but even with excellent singing it is to be anticipated because the frequency chosen to render a given note can, and ought, to vary with the musical meaning--context--of the note. For instance, "B" is nominally the leading tone of the scale and often will be sung rather sharp when preceding the tonic note, but flatter otherwise.)

One approach is to consider how much the notes, as recorded, would need to be transposed to place them into a standard scale. To this end let the frequencies of the notes be $$x_i,$$ each sustained for duration $$y_i.$$ Because frequencies modulo an octave are considered the same tone of the scale, we must begin by

1. Expressing the frequencies on a binary logarithmic scale and

2. Focusing on their fractional values: that is, reducing them modulo $$1.$$

When $$(2)$$ is performed, the durations of all frequencies with the same fractional log values must be summed to yield the total duration of that fraction.

A "scale" of length $$s$$ can be represented as a sequence of breaks $$(b_0=0, b_1, b_2, \ldots, b_s, b_{s+1}=1)$$ that partition the interval $$[0,1)$$ of all fractional logarithms. Any frequency whose fractional log lies in the interval $$[b_i, b_{i+1})$$ is assigned to note $$i$$ of the scale, $$i=1,2,\ldots, s.$$ The "well-tempered" scale (invented in the late 17th century) places $$s=12$$ breaks at exactly even intervals $$b_i=i/12.$$ I use this in the examples below.

The task of transposition, then, consists of adding some quantity $$h$$ to all the $$\log_2(x_i)$$ and assigning the result to a note of the scale. For an well-tempered scale, for instance, transposition of a frequency by $$h$$ can be represented by the mathematical formula

$$\operatorname{Note}(x\mid h) = \lfloor 12(\log_2(x) + h \mod 1) \rfloor + 1.$$

(Amounts like $$h$$ are traditionally measured in cents where one cent equals $$1/1200.$$ That is, there are $$100$$ cents in each of $$12$$ "semitones" comprising the chromatic well-tempered octave. Absent any harmonic background for reference, untrained humans usually do not detect errors smaller than about $$10$$ cents.)

Once we have transposed the data by some amount $$h,$$ $$0\le h\lt 1,$$ thereby (provisionally) assigning each recorded frequency a note of the scale, we (of course) sum the frequencies to obtain the proportions of time each note was sung. This is what we can hope to match to the reference "salience" distribution.

Although a chi-squared test is not appropriate for this purpose, a chi-squared-like statistic is a natural way to compare two note distributions. Specifically, let the reference scale assign a proportion of time $$p_i$$ to each note and suppose the data give corresponding proportions $$q_i.$$ The chi-squared statistic for the data (as transposed by $$h$$) is

$$\chi^2(h) = \sum_{i=1}^s \frac{(q_i-p_i)^2}{p_i}.$$

The numerator measures difference in proportions while the denominator weights that difference according to its expected variance. There are three strong reasons to expect $$\chi^2(h)$$ will not have a chi-squared distribution:

1. We are going to pick $$h$$ to achieve the best match to the reference distribution. By construction, this tends to decrease the value of $$\chi^2(h),$$ especially for small datasets or "noisy" data.

2. The data are not counts and the $$p_i$$ are not necessarily their variances. One (at least) of these is an essential precondition for any classical chi-squared test.

3. The data are not an independent sample from a distribution of notes. (Songs are not chaotic: they follow conventions for what differences of notes--"intervals"--are likely and pleasing.) This, too, is essential for any of the classical distribution tests (including all those mentioned in the question).

Nevertheless, the statistic itself is one of the better ways to compare two discrete distributions.

I propose transposing the data by an amount $$h$$ that creates the best possible match with the reference distribution.

After all, what else can one do?

Finally, we need to know the null distribution of this chi-squared statistic: what value is it likely to have for a given dataset if that dataset is generated according to the reference distribution? A full, correct answer to this question requires the ability to generate random plausible-sounding songs. We don't have the information to do that. What we can do is draw independent samples of a given size from the reference distribution, go through the process of transposition and note assignment for each such sample, and track the chi-squared statistic it generates. Doing this a few hundred times will give us a good sense of what such randomly-generated data look like. We can use this to assess the chi-squared statistic for the actual data. If this is unusually large, we may conclude the data were not generated in the way we supposed. In particular, that would constitute evidence against the supposition that the salience distribution was involved.

Let's look at some examples.

Here is a summary of $$80$$ frequencies (each of unit duration, for simplicity) generated using the reference distribution in the key of A (where the tonic is at 440 Hz).

These notes were sung to an accuracy of $$\pm 15$$ cents each. You can make out all $$12$$ notes as clusters in the histogram. When optimally transposed, these frequencies match the reference distribution (as I have transcribed it from the bar plot in the question, at least) pretty well:

             C  C#   D  D#    E    F  F#    G  G#   A  A#   B
Reference 12.4 4.1 6.9 4.2  8.3  7.9 4.5 10.2 4.3 7.1 4.2 5.7
Fit        9.0 4.0 7.0 4.0 10.0 13.0 4.0 11.0 6.0 5.0 4.0 3.0


For instance, we would expect about $$12.4$$ notes in the tonic (C) and heard $$9$$ in of them, and so on. The chi-squared statistic for this comparison is $$7.3.$$ But is that close or not?

To find out, I repeated this process a thousand more times. Here is a summary of all thousand random results.

The originally observed value of $$7.3$$ falls smack in the center, indicating it is perfectly consistent with this "null distribution."

In contrast to this, I generated $$80$$ notes uniformly between $$120$$ and $$180$$ Hz (spanning B to F#, roughly). This time the chi-squared statistic was $$53:$$ literally off the chart and obviously inconsistent with the reference. No surprise: this dataset had no chance of including the upper half of the scale (G# through B).

Now for some of the surprises. Many people might expect such reference distributions to behave like a chi-squared distribution. On the preceding histogram I have superimposed graphs of five chi-squared distributions having $$11=12-1$$ degrees of freedom (dark blue) down to $$7$$ DF.

None of the colored graphs are great descriptions of the null distribution. The ones that come closest have only $$7$$ (red) and $$8$$ (yellow) DF. Few people would expect these values for the DF when comparing distributions with $$12$$ categories--no theory suggests they should have these specific values.

(For comparison, the same five graphs appear on all the later histograms.)

The next surprise is that the null distribution depends heavily on even small errors in tonal generation. Here are the results of exactly the same simulation, but this time with no errors.

This time the chi-squared distribution with $$11$$ DF is a beautiful fit. Thus, the presence of just $$\pm 15$$ cents error in intonation substantially changed the null distribution.

The third surprise (maybe it's not so much of a surprise) is that short, totally-random "songs" are difficult to distinguish from the reference. This is a repeat of the first simulation, but this time frequencies were generated uniformly between $$120$$ and $$240$$ Hz. (The "salience" distribution, when plotted, would have 12 bars of equal heights.)

The original distribution has been shifted right (towards higher chi-squared values), as one might hope, but it exhibits substantial overlap with the null distribution. Why is there not much shifting? The reason is that uniformly random data are usually not exactly uniform: they have some higher and lower frequencies. It is all to easy to take such a dataset and find a way to transpose it so that it still closely matches the reference distribution. If we want a chance of distinguishing the uniform "songs" from the reference songs, we need more data.

Here is what the null and alternative distributions look like with $$n=320$$ frequencies in the dataset (again, sung with up to 15 cents error).

First, notice that the null distribution itself has shifted a little relative to the null for $$n=80.$$ Yet the shift isn't huge: it is approximated by a chi-squared distribution with $$8$$ DF instead of $$7.$$ But the alternative distribution is now far to the right, clearly beyond the tails of any of these chi-squared plots. This means that with a song of total duration $$320,$$ we can almost surely distinguish between the reference distribution and a uniform alternative distribution.

These surprises give abundant reasons for caution. Do your best to generate a realistic null distribution, preferably according to how you think the song might have been sung, and consider using this transpose/note assignment/chi-squared approach to assess how close your data come to that null.

• many thanks for your very helpful answer @whuber! will read on it & catch up with the discussion soon, and then reply Nov 10, 2021 at 15:58

Since there are still no other answers to this question and several comments by @whuber highlighted flaws in using Pearson's Chi-Square test, here is a second answer that uses the Mann-Whitney U test. Before answering, I'll point out that the question itself includes 3 possible solutions that the author seemed interested in, but abandoned only for coding problems. It may be more reasonable to try to fix the coding problem instead of seeking different methods (which again may not result in data formats that work with whatever implementations you have available).

1. Convert your theoretical distribution from tones to frequencies.

2. Auto-tune your subject's singing to make sure the pitch is correct, then change the frequencies to fit into a single octave (so that it is comparable to your single octave theoretical distribution). I'm assuming here that imperfect pitch is not a part of this study, otherwise this breaks down.

3. You can subdivide into notes as I recommended in #2 of my previous answer. Alternatively, determine the number of milliseconds for each frequency in the subject's singing, then determine the total number of milliseconds.

4. Now, make a new vector to contain sung frequencies. For each frequency sung, repeatedly add that frequency to the vector however many milliseconds it was sung. For example, if 440 hz was sung for 4000 milliseconds, add 440 to the vector 4000 times.

5. Now make the same type of vector using the theoretical distribution. If the subject sang for a total of 10000 milliseconds and the theoretical distribution says that 440 hz should be 40% of the frequencies, then add 440 to the vector $$10000\times 0.4=4000$$ times.

6. These two vectors now contain the distributions that you'll compare. Run the Mann-Whitney U test to compare them.

7. The data is in a format that allows you to readily visualize where the differences are, if there are any.

Comments: this may not address your circular problem without using a work-around, but I can't think of anything that does address it automatically. Your question explicitly says that you're using a major-key as your theoretical distribution and one of your comments explicitly says that you're comparing the subject's singing to a diatonic scale. If you're specifically interested in comparing to a diatonic major scale, you should be able to pick out the tonal centre of the subject's singing in order to determine which theoretical distribution you need to pick for comparison (i.e. you can hear which key they're singing in).

Here is what I would do in your situation. Whether it works for you depends on the format and quantity of your data, but I do think that it will yield the answer you're looking for if the data allows this method. The method is a regular Pearson's chi-squared test. The reason this choice makes sense is that music is arranged in time (it can be subdivided into countable notes rather than chaotic, arbitrary intervals of time) and you are using a 12 tone scale.

1. You have sung frequencies and the time in seconds for each frequency. You've already said that you can convert frequencies to tones. Do so. I assume you ignore octave since the picture of your theoretic distribution only contains one octave.

2. Convert your sung data from continuous time to a count of standardized notes. You say the experimental subject was singing. Even if the subject was not using a metronome, you can probably impose a loose metre and use your subject-matter expertise to transcribe the melody. Put another way, if you took a subject's melody, you could probably write it in musical notation. If you did that, you would see not continuous times, but notes of finite duration. Find the smallest meaningful subdivision (probably a 16th? Maybe a 32nd?) in your subjects' melodies and then subdivide all of their other notes into that unit and count them. From now on, I'll refer to this standardized subdivision simply as the "units." You'll count how many units for each tone was sung, and also sum the total units sung by the subject. The data format for the subject should now be 13 variables. The first 12 contain values that are the number of units of each tone sung by the subject, and the 13th variable is the total number of units they sang. The crucial point here is that you're standardizing the melodies into a unit, the chosen subdivision, then counting how many of those units were sung in each tone.

*You could keep the data in time and subdivide the seconds into counts, but notes are better. The reason is that music is inherently structured into note durations, and note durations don't need to be rounded up or down. Moreover, if you're publishing or presenting this, notes are probably more easily understood by your audience since most of them will be musically inclined. There is natural structure here. Use it if you can.

3. Now, you have a theoretical distribution of a major scale. You didn't say what the units were, but you need to convert it into a probability mass function. In other words, what proportion of notes do you expect to be the tonic? the 2nd? The major 3rd? You should be able to make this conversion relatively easily if you've already got literature on the subject and an example distribution.

4. You now have a recipe for getting your answer. You already have the observed counts in each tone and their total count from what your subject sang. To get their expected counts, take your theoretical distribution of the major scale and multiply each note probability by the total number of notes sung by the subject. E.g. if the subject sung a total of 100 notes and your theoretical distribution says that 40% of their sung notes should be a C and only 5% should be a C#, then their expected count of C should be $$100\times0.4=40$$ C notes and the expected count of C# should be $$100\times0.05=5$$.

5. Treat your data as a one-way table with 12 categories (the tones), and perform Pearson's Chi-Squared test. There are multiple other tests you could try, but this is the most well-known.

The benefits I see of using the above methods are (1) you're using the natural structure of music and musical scales, (2) visualizations (histograms or others) of expected versus observed counts will be far clearer than trying to compare a plot of times and frequencies, (3) those visualizations of expected versus observed counts make the extent and type of differences between your theoretical distribution and subject's distribution very clear in a way that other methods do not allow (you can clearly see how much they differ and by which tones they differ), and (4) you're using a well-known and simple statistical method to check the significance of the difference.

The pitfalls of using this methods are (1) your data format may make it difficult, (2) transcribing the melody may be difficult depending on the technology or skill that you possess for this purpose and how long the recording is, (3) Pearson's chi-squared test assumes independence of events, which almost certainly is not strictly fulfilled here (keep in mind the same subject is singing multiple notes--the units are not independent. Whether this matters depends on exactly what you're trying to explain here), and (4) if the singing is short, you may not have enough units to achieve reliable results.

• A chi-squared approach is a good idea, but the details are incorrect and will produce the wrong p-values, as I have explained at stats.stackexchange.com/a/17148/919. It also overlooks the basic issue of the question, which concerns which scale is involved. That is what makes this inherently a question about circular data.
– whuber
Nov 8, 2021 at 15:12
• That's an excellent, if disturbing, bit of information... Time to pick up Kendall & Stuart Volume II, I suppose. Thanks for the link. For the circular issue, the asker says that it's "probably not critical, as I can loop this manually (i.e. compare against all 12 keys for the 2nd distribution)." The asker could also code using scale-degrees instead of tone. This resolves the circularity, doesn't it? Few subjects are going to be humming something so outlandish that the tonal centre cannot be identified, although it's an admittedly possible edge case.
– AJV
Nov 8, 2021 at 15:47
• It doesn't resolve the issues of (a) resolving the imperfect tones (notice that far more than 12 tones are recorded in the example); (b) finding a theoretically suitable way to estimate the frequencies; and (c) determining the correct numbers of DF for the chi-squared statistic. The example in the question is a nice one because it does not exhibit a clear tonic.
– whuber
Nov 8, 2021 at 16:02
• For (a) there are far more than 12 frequencies recorded, but that's probably because (1) they aren't perfectly on pitch and (2) they're singing over multiple octaves, as most do. Octave and imperfect pitch don't seem to be relevant to the study. For (c), your link above is the first I've heard of that problem, so I have no ideas to salvage this methodology.
– AJV
Nov 8, 2021 at 16:42
• Imperfect pitch looks important, for by ignoring it you would be overlooking a major source of error. (c) is basic to the chi-squared test: you can find many questions here on CV asking how to compute the DF for that test. One hint that it's likely to be an issue comes from the need to determine the key of the data: that requires a search or a fitting procedure. How many DF ought that to consume?
– whuber
Nov 8, 2021 at 17:58