Musical Information Retrieval using Melodic Surface

摘要

The automatic best-match and content-based retrieval of musical documents against musical queries is addressed in this paper. By "musical documents" we mean scores or per-formances, while musical queries are supposed to be inserted by final users using a musical interface (GUI or MIDI key-board). Musical documents lack of separators necessary to detect "lexical units" like text words. Moreover there are many variants of a musical phrase between different works. The paper presents a technique to automatically detect musical phrases to be used as content descriptors, and conflate musical phrase variants by extracting a common stem. An experimental study reports on the results of indexing and retrieval tests using the vector-space model. The technique can complement catalogue-based access whenever the user is unable to use fixed values, or he would find performances or scores being "similar" n content to known ones.