Abstracting musical queries: Towards a musicologist's workbench

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a paradigm for computer-based music retrieval and analysis systems that employs one or more explicit abstraction layers between the user and corpus- and representation-specific tools. With illustrations drawn from "battle music", a genre popular throughout Renaissance Europe, we show how such an approach may not only be more obviously useful to a user, but also offer extra power through the ability to generalise classes of tasks across collections. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.