With the growth in digital representations of music, and of music stored in these representations, it is increasingly attractive to search collections of music. One mode of search is by similarity, but, for music, similarity search presents several difficulties: in particular, deciding what part of the music is likely to be perceived as the theme by a listener, and deciding whether two pieces of music with different sequences of notes represent the same theme. In this paper we propose a three-stage framework for matching pieces of music. We use the framework to compare a range of techniques for determining whether two pieces of music are similar, by experimentally testing their ability to retrieve different transcriptions of the same piece of music from a large collection of MIDI files. These experiments show that different comparison techniques differ widely in their effectiveness; and

Large volumes of music are available online, represented in performance formats such as MIDI and, increasingly, in abstract notation such as SMDL. Many types of user would find it valuable to search collections of music via queries representing music fragments, but such searching requires a reliable technique for identifying whether a provided fragment occurs within a piece of music. The problem of matching fragments to music is made difficult by the psychology of music perception, because literal matching may have little relation to perceived melodic similarity, and by the interactions between the multiple parts of typical pieces of music. In this paper we analyse the properties of music, music perception, and music database users, and use the analysis to propose alternative techniques for extracting monophonic melodies from polyphonic music; we believe that such melodies can subsequently be used for matching of queries to data. We report on experiments with music listeners, which rank our proposed techniques for extracting melodies.

We have explored methods for music information retrieval for polyphonic music stored in the MIDI format. These methods use a query, expressed as a series of notes that are intended to represent a melody or theme, to identify similar pieces. Our work has shown that a three-phase architecture is appropriate for this task, in which the first phase is melody extraction, the second is standardisation, and the third is query-to-melody matching. We have investigated and systematically compared algorithms for each of these phases. To ensure that our results are robust, we have applied methodologies that are derived from text information retrieval: we developed test collections and compared different ways of acquiring test queries and relevance judgements. In this paper we review this program of work, compare to other approaches to music information retrieval, and identify outstanding issues.

Most research into music information retrieval thus far has only examined music from the western tradition. However, music of other origins often conforms to different tuning systems. Therefore there are problems both in representing this music as well as finding matches to queries from these diverse tuning systems. We discuss the issues associated with microtonal music retrieval and present some preliminary results from an experiment in applying scoring matrices to microtonal matching. 1.

Music has an auditory and temporal nature. The same piece can be interpreted in multiple, and often unrelated ways. Together with the limitations of its representations, the design of content-based music retrieval systems on the Web is a challenge. Most literatures on the problem map the problem to existing information retrieval paradigms, mainly that of text, by modelling music as a sequence of features [Lin77][MS90]. However, this mapping raises issues to be solved. Through the study of the statistical properties of six features including Profile, Note Duration Ratio Sequence, Interval Sequence and their variants, we answer four important questions that arises from mapping. These include the number of musical "alphabets" and "words", whether Zipf's law holds for musical features, whether there are any musical "stopwords", and the range of n for n-gram based music indices. The answers to these questions will affect crucial parameters in music retrieval systems, and whether the mapping...

journal of interdisciplinary music studies season 200x, volume x, issue x, art. #xxxxxx, pp. xx-xx