A score-driven approach to music information retrieval

As the dimension and number of digital music archives grow, the problem of storing and accessing multimedia data is no longer confined to the database area. Specific approaches for music information retrieval are necessary to establish a connection between textual and content-based metadata. This article addresses such issues with the intent of surveying our perspective on music information retrieval. In particular, we stress the use of symbolic information as a central element in a complex musical environment. Musical themes, harmonies, and styles are automatically extracted from electronic music scores and employed as access keys to data. The database schema is extended to handle audio recordings. A score/audio matching module provides a temporal relationship between a music performance and the score played. Besides standard free-text search capabilities, three levels of retrieval strategies are employed. Moreover, the introduction of a hierarchy of input modalities assures meeting the needs and matching the expertise of a wide group of users. Singing, playing, and notating melodic excerpts is combined with more advanced musicological queries, such as querying by a sequence of chords. Finally, we present some experimental results and our future research directions.