Musical information retrieval using melodic surface

Abstract

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 performances, while musical queries are supposed to be inserted by final users using a musical interface (GUI or MIDI keyboard). 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' in content to known ones.