A database approach to symbolic music content management

Abstract

The paper addresses the problem of content-based access to large repositories of digitized music scores. We propose a data model and query language that allow an in-depth management of musical content. In order to cope with the flexibility of music material, the language is designed to easily incorporate user-defined functions at early steps of the query evaluation process. We describe our architectural vision, develop a formal description of the language, and illustrate a user-friendly syntax with several classical examples of symbolic music information retrieval. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.