Abstract

The emergence of digital music on the Internet requires new information retrieval methods adapted to the specific characteristics and needs. While music retrieval based on the text information, such as title, composers, or subject classification, has been implemented in many existing systems, retrieval of a piece of music based on music contents, especially based on an incomplete, imperfect recall of a fragment of the music, has not yet been fully explored. This thesis is to explore the main problems involved in a web-based melody retrieval system. I propose to build a query-by-humming system, which can find a piece of music in the digital music repository based on a few hummed notes, using a melody representation that combines both the pitch contour and the beat information. Since an input query (hummed melody) may have various errors due to uncertainty of the user's memory or the user's singing ability, the system should be able to tolerate the errors. Furthermore, extracting m...

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