Abstract

With interest in music information retrieval increasing the need for retrieval systems unique to music is also growing. Despite its unique properties music shares many similarities with text. The goal of this paper is to explore some of the capabilities and limitations of current text information retrieval systems as applied to the task of music retrieval. Monophonic music is converted into text and retrieval experiments are run using two different text information retrieval systems in various configurations. Finally, we will discuss whether the techniques applied here are generalizable to the larger problem of polyphonic music retrieval. 1

Citations

684	A language modeling approach to information retrieval - Ponte, Croft - 1998
309	The INQUERY retrieval system - Callan, Croft, et al. - 1992
77	The New Zealand Digital Library MELody inDEX, D-Lib Magazine - MacNab, Smith, et al. - 1997
53	Evaluating a Simple Approach to Music Information Retrieval: Conceiving Melodic ngrams as Text - Downie - 1999
28	The TREC Conferences - Harman - 1995
1	Nightingale music notation software. http://www.ngale.com - AMNS - 2000
1	Problems of information retrieval - Byrd - 2000
1	Digital tradition folk song database. The Digital Tradition. http://web2.xerox.com/digitrad - DT - 1996
1	Lucy in the sky with diamonds. Recording, from the album ”Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club - Lennon - 1967
1	The essen folksong collection. (Four computer disks containing 6,255 folksong transcriptions and 34-page research guide. http://www.musicog.ohiostate.edu/Huron/publications.html - Schaffrath - 1995