Towards the digital music library (original) (raw)

Towards the digital music library: Tune retrieval from acoustic input

1996

Music is traditionally retrieved by title, composer or subject classification. It is possible, with current technology, to retrieve music from a database on the basis of a few notes sung or hummed into a microphone. This paper describes the implementation of such a system, and discusses several issues pertaining to music retrieval. We first describe an interface that transcribes acoustic input into standard music notation. We then analyze string matching requirements for ranked retrieval of music and present the results of an experiment which tests how accurately people sing well known melodies. The performance of several string matching criteria are analyzed using two folk song databases. Finally, we describe a prototype system which has been developed for retrieval of tunes from acoustic input.

Music Information Retrieval Using Audio Input

1997

This paper describes a system designed to retrieve melodies from a database on the basis of a few notes sung into a microphone. The system first accepts acoustic input from the user, transcribes it into common music notation, then searches a database of 9400 folk tunes for those containing the sung pattern, or patterns similar to the sung pattern; retrieval is ranked according to the closeness of the match. The paper presents an analysis of the performance of the system using different search criteria involving melodic contour, musical intervals and rhythm; tests were carried out using both exact and approximate string matching. Approximate matching used a dynamic programming algorithm designed for comparing musical sequences. Current work focuses on developing a faster algorithm.

Tune Retrieval in the Multimedia Library

Digital Libraries and Multimedia, 2002

Musical scores are traditionally retrieved by title, composer or subject classification. Just as multimedia computer systems increase the range of opportunities available for presenting musical information, so they also offer new ways of posing musically-oriented queries. This paper shows how scores can be retrieved from a database on the basis of a few notes sung or hummed into a microphone. The design of such a facility raises several interesting issues pertaining to music retrieval. We first describe an interface that transcribes acoustic input into standard music notation. We then analyze string matching requirements for ranked retrieval of music and present the results of an experiment which tests how accurately people sing well known melodies. The performance of several string matching criteria are analyzed using two folk song databases. Finally, we describe a prototype system which has been developed for retrieval of tunes from acoustic input and evaluate its performance.

Building a melody retrieval system

National Conference on Communications, Bombay, …, 2002

This paper describes some early attempts at developing a music indexing and retrieval system based on melody, or tune, of songs. In the envisaged system, the "query", a song fragment whistled or sung by the user into a microphone, is used to search a database of soundtracks to find the entry that is best matched to it in tune. The challenging issues that this project raises are described. Signal processing tools suitable for melody detection are presented, and finally some experimentally obtained results are discussed.

A Survey of Music Information Retrieval Systems

2005

This survey paper provides an overview of content-based music information retrieval systems, both for audio and for symbolic music notation. Matching algorithms and indexing methods are briefly presented. The need for a TREC-like comparison of matching algorithms such as MIREX at ISMIR becomes clear from the high number of quite different methods which so far only have been used on different data collections. We placed the systems on a map showing the tasks and users for which they are suitable, and we find that existing content-based retrieval systems fail to cover a gap between the very general and the very specific retrieval tasks.

Music Retrieval: A Tutorial and Review

The increasing availability of music in digital format needs to be matched by the development of tools for music accessing, filtering, classification, and retrieval. The research area of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) covers many of these aspects. The aim of this paper is to present an overview of this vast and new field. A number of issues, which are peculiar to the music language, are described-including forms, formats, and dimensions of music-together with the typologies of users and their information needs. To fulfil these needs a number of approaches are discussed, from direct search to information filtering and clustering of music documents. An overview of the techniques for music processing, which are commonly exploited in many approaches, is also presented. Evaluation and comparisons of the approaches on a common benchmark are other important issues. To this end, a description of the initial efforts and evaluation campaigns for MIR is provided.

Query by humming: Automatically building the database from music recordings

Pattern Recognition Letters, 2014

Singing or humming to a music search engine is an appealing multimodal interaction paradigm, particularly for small sized portable devices that are ubiquitous nowadays. The aim of this work is to overcome the main shortcoming of the existing query-by-humming (QBH) systems: their lack of scalability in terms of the difficulty of automatically extending the database of melodies from audio recordings. A method is proposed to extract the singing voice melody from polyphonic music providing the necessary information to index it as an element in the database. The search of a query pattern in the database is carried out combining note sequence matching and pitch time series alignment. A prototype system was developed and experiments are carried out pursuing a fair comparison between manual and automatic expansion of the database. In the light of the obtained performance (85% in the top-10), which is encouraging given the results reported to date, this can be considered a proof of concept that validates the approach.

Querying Music Databases by Acoustic and Textual

With continued growth of music content available on the Internet, music information retrieval has attracted increasing attention. An important challenge for music searching is its ability to support both keyword and content based queries efficiently and with high precision. In this paper, we present a music query system − QueST to support both keyword and content based retrieval in large music databases. QueST stands for Query by acouStic and T extual features. The QueST approach has two distinct features. First, it provides new index schemes that can efficiently handle various queries within a uniform architecture. Concretely, we propose a hybrid structure consisting of Inverted file and Signature file to support keyword search. For content based query, we introduce the notion of similarity to capture various music semantics like melody and genre. We extract acoustic features from a music object, and map it into multiple high-dimension spaces with respect to the similarity notion using PCA and RBF neural network. Second, we design a result fusion scheme, called the Quick Threshold Algorithm, to speed up the processing of complex queries involving both textual and multiple acoustic features. Our experimental results show that QueST offers higher accuracy and efficiency compared to existing algorithms.