Fundamentals on Music and Audio Data

Abstract

In the first part of this monograph, we discuss content-based analysis and retrieval techniques for music and audio data. To account for the interdisciplinary character of this research field, we start in this chapter with some fundamentals on music representations and digital signal processing. In particular, we summarize basic facts on the score, MIDI, and audio format (Sect. 2.1). We then review various forms of the Fourier transform (Sect. 2.2) and give a short account of digital convolution filters (Sect. 2.3). Doing so, we hope to refine and sharpen the understanding of the required basic signal transforms. This will be essential for the design as well as for the proper interpretation of musically relevant audio features, see Chap. 3.