Searching digital music libraries 1 Running head: SEARCHING DIGITAL MUSIC LIBRARIES Searching digital music libraries (original) (raw)

Searching digital music libraries

Information Processing & Management, 2005

There has been a recent explosion of interest in digital music libraries. In particular, interactive melody retrieval is a striking example of a search paradigm that differs radically from the standard full-text search. Many different techniques have been proposed for melody matching, but the area lacks standard databases that allow them to be compared on common grounds-and copyright issues have stymied attempts to develop such a corpus. This paper focuses on methods for evaluating different symbolic music matching strategies, and describes a series of experiments that compare and contrast results obtained using three dominant paradigms.

Melodic matching techniques for large music databases

Proceedings of the seventh ACM international conference on Multimedia (Part 1) - MULTIMEDIA '99, 1999

With the growth in digital representations of music, and of music stored in these representations, it is increasingly attractive to search collections of music. One mode of search is by similarity, but, for music, similarity search presents several difficulties: in particular, for melodic query support, deciding what part of the music is likely to be perceived as the theme by a listener, and deciding whether two pieces of music with different sequences of notes represent the same theme. In this paper we propose a three-stage framework for matching pieces of music. We use the framework to compare a range of techniques for determining whether two pieces of music are similar, by experimentally testing their ability to retrieve different transcriptions of the same piece of music from a large collection of MIDI files. These experiments show that different comparison techniques differ widely in their effectiveness; and that, by instantiating the framework with appropriate music manipulation and comparison techniques, pieces of music that match a query can be identified in a large collection.

Search Effectiveness Measures For Symbolic Music Queries In Very Large Databases

2004

In the interest of establishing robust benchmarks for search efficiency, we conducted a series of tests on symbolic databases of musical incipits and themes taken from several diverse repertories. The results we report differ from existing studies in four respects: (1) the data quantity is much larger (c. 100,000 entries); (2) the levels of melodic and rhythmic precision are more refined; (3) anchored and unanchored searches were differentiated; and (4) results from joint pitch-and-rhythm searches were compared with those for pitch-only searches. The search results were evaluated using a theoretical approach which seeks to rank the number of symbols required to achieve "sufficient uniqueness". How far into a melody must a search go in order to find an item which is unmatched by any other of the available items? How much does the answer depend on the specificity of the query? How much does anchoring the query matter? How much does the result depend on the nature of the repertory? We offer experimental results for these questions.

Matching Techniques for Large Music Databases

ACM Multimedia Conference, 2000

With the growth in digital representations of music, and of music stored in these representations, it is increasingly attractive to search collections of music. One mode of search is by similarity, but, for music, similarity search presents several difficulties: in particular, deciding what part of the music is likely to be perceived as the theme by a listener, and deciding whether two pieces of music with different sequences of notes represent the same theme. In this paper we propose a three-stage framework for matching pieces of music. We use the framework to compare a range of techniques for determining whether two pieces of music are similar, by experimentally testing their ability to retrieve different transcriptions of the same piece of music from a large collection of MIDI files. These experiments show that different comparison techniques differ widely in their effectiveness; and that, by instantiating the framework with appropriate music manipulation and comparison techniques, pieces of music that match a query can be identified in a large collection.

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.

Pattern Based Melody Matching Approach to Music Information Retrieval

Transactions on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, 2018

Digitization of music and advancements in information technology for sharing information on World Wide Web paved way for its availability in enormous quantities anywhere any time. Rather than retrieving annotated music in response to query given in terms of Metadata such as name of the composer/singer, genre etc modern researchers are challenged towards content based music information retrieval systems (CBMIR). CBMIR systems differ while representing the main melody either as a note sequence or as an analog acoustic signal; the note sequence representation is explored in this research work. Based on the observation that repeating patterns of the note sequences representing the main melody capture the essence of the music object, this research work developed a framework to investigate the feasibility and effectiveness of pattern based melody matching approach to music information retrieval. Experimentation is conducted on a real world dataset of musical objects belonging to South Indian classical music and the performance of the framework is estimated in terms of Mean Reciprocal Ranking.

Searching musical audio using symbolic queries

2008

Abstract Finding a piece of music based on its content is a key problem in music in for music information retrieval. For example, a user may be interested in finding music based on knowledge of only a small fragment of the overall tune. In this paper, we consider the searching of musical audio using symbolic queries. We first propose a relative pitch approach for representing queries and pieces. Experiments show that this technique, while effective, works best when the whole tune is used as a query.

Adaptation of string matching algorithms for identification of near-duplicate music documents

2007

The number of copyright registrations for music documents is increasing each year. Computer-based systems may help to detect near-duplicate music documents and plagiarisms. The main part of the existing systems for the comparison of symbolic music are based on string matching algorithms and represent music as sequences of notes. Nevertheless, adaptation to the musical context raises specific problems and a direct adaptation does not lead to an accurate detection algorithm: indeed, very different sequences can represent very similar musical pieces. We are developing an improved system which mainly considers melody but takes also into account elements of music theory in order to detect musically important differences between sequences. In this paper, we present the improvements proposed by our system in the context of the near-duplicate music document detection. Several experiments with famous music copyright infringement cases are proposed. In both monophonic and polyphonic context, the system allows the detection of plagiarisms.

Music information retrieval research and its context at the University of Waikato

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2004

This article describes the digital music library work at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. At the heart of the project is a music information retrieval workbench for evaluating algorithms and performing experiments used in conjunction with four datasets of symbolic notation ranging from contemporary to classical pieces. The outcome of this experimentation is woven together with strands from our larger digital library project to form the Web-based music digital library MELDEX (short for melody index). An overview of the workbench software architecture is given along with a description of how this fits the larger digital library design, followed by several examples of MELDEX in use.

An architecture for effective music information retrieval

Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2004

We have explored methods for music information retrieval for polyphonic music stored in the MIDI format. These methods use a query, expressed as a series of notes that are intended to represent a melody or theme, to identify similar pieces. Our work has shown that a three-phase architecture is appropriate for this task, in which the first phase is melody extraction, the second is standardisation, and the third is query-to-melody matching. We have investigated and systematically compared algorithms for each of these phases. To ensure that our results are robust, we have applied methodologies that are derived from text information retrieval: we developed test collections and compared different ways of acquiring test queries and relevance judgements. In this paper we review this program of work, compare to other approaches to music information retrieval, and identify outstanding issues.