Benchmarking Music Information Retrieval Systems

Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2004

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.

2005

This survey paper provides an overview of content-based music information retrieval systems, both for audio and for symbolic music notation. Matching algorithms and indexing methods are briefly presented. The need for a TREC-like comparison of matching algorithms such as MIREX at ISMIR becomes clear from the high number of quite different methods which so far only have been used on different data collections. We placed the systems on a map showing the tasks and users for which they are suitable, and we find that existing content-based retrieval systems fail to cover a gap between the very general and the very specific retrieval tasks.

Signals and Communication Technology, 2017

Proc. Int. Symp. on Music Information Retrieval ( …, 2002

The digital revolution has brought about a massive increase in the availability and distribution of music-related documents of various modalities comprising textual, audio, as well as visual material. Therefore, the development of techniques and tools for organizing, structuring, retrieving, navigating, and presenting music-related data has become a major strand of research—the field is often referred to as Music Information Retrieval (MIR). Major challenges arise because of the richness and diversity of music in form and content leading to novel and exciting research problems. In this article, we give an overview of new developments in the MIR field with a focus on content-based music analysis tasks including audio retrieval, music synchronization, structure analysis, and performance analysis.

International Symposium/Conference on Music Information Retrieval, 2000

The origins of music information retrieval (MIR) are in manual collections of incipits, short melodic fragments obtained from the beginning of pieces of music. The collections were manually compiled and usually covered a narrow field of music. Recently, computerized content- based MIR systems have appeared. They apply standard methods from general string matching. The applied techniques are based on the

Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, 2013

The field of Music Information Retrieval has always acknowledged the need for rigorous scientific evaluations, and several efforts have set out to develop and provide the infrastructure, technology and methodologies needed to carry out these evaluations. The community has enormously gained from these evaluation forums, but we have reached a point where we are stuck with evaluation frameworks that do not allow us to improve as much and as well as we want. The community recently acknowledged this problem and showed interest in addressing it, though it is not clear what to do to improve the situation. We argue that a good place to start is again the Text IR field. Based on a formalization of the evaluation process, this paper presents a survey of past evaluation work in the context of Text IR, from the point of view of validity, reliability and efficiency of the experiments. We show the problems that our community currently has in terms of evaluation, point to several lines of research to improve it and make various proposals in that line.

2004 IEEE Symposium on Virtual Environments, Human-Computer Interfaces and Measurement Systems, 2004. (VCIMS).

Music is a particular case of audio media that has peculiar requirements for retrieval. Its representation, parallelism and multiple features are some examples of the challenges encountered. In this paper, these challenges are characterized and the techniques commonly used for classification, indexing and searching of music content are described. Whenever possible, comparisons are drawn with Text Information Retrieval.

2005

This paper is an extended abstract which provides a brief preliminary overview of the 2005 Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange (MIREX 2005). The MIREX organizational framework and infrastructure are outlined. Summary data concerning the 10 evaluation contests is provided. Key issues affecting future MIR evaluations are identified and discussed. The paper concludes with a listing of targets items to be undertaken before MIREX 2006 to ensure the ongoing success of the MIREX framework.

Journal of Intelligent Information Systems

Increasing availability of music data via Internet evokes demand for efficient search through music files. Users' interests include melody tracking, harmonic structure analysis, timbre identification, and so on. We visualize, in an illustrative example, why content based search is needed for music data and what difficulties must be overcame to build an intelligent music information retrieval system.